The Shepherd's Calendar

gisacollection publishedin1829. DrawingfromarticlesthatappearedinBlackwood's Edinburgh Magazine since 1819, these tales capture the haunting landscape and folklore of the Scottish Borders, particularly Hogg's native Ettrick For est. The stories range from supernatural encounters and mysterious deaths to dreams of damnation and eerie manifestations. Witches, fairies, brown ies, and vengeful spirits populate these narratives of judgment, misfortune, and the uncanny forces that shape rural Scottish life.It was on the 13th of February 1823, on a cold stormy day, the snow lying from one to ten feet deep on the hills, and nearly as hard as ice, when an extensive store-farmer in the outer limits of the county of Peebles went up to one of his led farms, to see how his old shepherd was coming on with his flocks. Apartialthawhadblackenedsomespotshereandthereonthebrows ofthemountains, andoverthesethehalf-starvingflockswerescattered, pick ing up a scanty sustenance, while all the hollow parts, and whole sides of mountains that lay sheltered from the winds on the preceding week, when the great drifts blew, were heaped and over-heaped with immense loads of snow, so that every hill appeared to the farmer to have changed its form. There was a thick white haze on the sky, corresponding exactly with the wan frigid colour of the high mountains, so that in casting one's eye up to the heights, it was not apparent where the limits of the earth ended, and the heavens began. There wasnohorizon-noblinkofthesunlookingthrough the pale and impervious mist of heaven; but there, in that elevated and se questered hope, the old shepherd and his flock seemed to be left out of na ture and all its sympathies,