A voice bade Dick try his courage,
warning him that much depended upon his first choosing either the
horn or the sword. Dick, whose stout heart quailed before the
supernatural terrors of the hall, attempted to blow the horn
before unsheathing the sword. At the first feeble blast the
warriors and their steeds started to life, the knights fiercely
brandishing their weapons and clashing their armour. Dick made a
fruitless attempt to snatch the sword. After a mysterious voice
had pronounced his doom he was hurled out of the hall by a
whirlwind of irresistible fury. He told his story to the
shepherds, who found him dying on the cold hill side.
Regarding this legend as "an unhappy foundation for a prose
story," Scott did not complete his fragment, which in style and
treatment is not unlike the Gothic experiments of Mrs. Barbauld
and Dr. Nathan Drake. Such a story as that of the magic horn and
sword might have been told in the simple words that occur
naturally to a shepherd, "warmed to courage over his third
tumbler," like the old peasant to whom Stevenson entrusts the
terrible tale of _Thrawn Janet_, or to Wandering Willie, who
declared:
"I whiles mak a tale serve the turn among the country
bodies, and I have some fearsome anes, that mak the
auld carlines shake on the settle, and bits o' bairns
skirl on their minnies out frae their beds.
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