ght not to allow her a pension, for having had her
heart's love turned into a sainted martyr by the hands of idolatrous
traitors.

Lady Grenville (who had a great opinion of Lucy's medical skill, and
always sent for her if one of the children had a "housty," i. e. sore
throat) went forth and pleaded the case before Sir Richard with such
effect, that Lucy was on the whole better off than ever for the next two
or three years. But now--what had she to do with Rose's disappearance?
and, indeed, where was she herself? Her door was fast; and round it her
flock of goats stood, crying in vain for her to come and milk them;
while from the down above, her donkeys, wandering at their own sweet
will, answered the bay of the bloodhound with a burst of harmony.

"They'm laughing at us, keper, they neddies; sure enough, we'm lost our
labor here."

But the bloodhound, after working about the door a while, turned down
the glen, and never stopped till he reached the margin of the sea.

"They'm taken water. Let's go back, and rout out the old witch's
house."

"'Tis just like that old Lucy, to lock a poor maid into shame."

And returning, they attacked the cottage, and by a general plebiscitum,
ransacked the little dwelling, partly in indignation, and partly, if the
truth be told, in the hope of plunder; but plunder there was none. Lucy
had decamped with all her movable wealth, saving the huge black cat
among the embers, who at the sight of the bloodhound vanished up the
chimney (some said with a strong smell of brimstone), and being viewed
outside, was chased into the woods, where she lived, I doubt not, many
happy years, a scourge to all the rabbits of the glen.

The goats and donkeys were driven off up to Stow; and the mob returned,
a little ashamed of themselves when their brief wrath was past; and a
little afraid, too, of what Sir Richard might say.

He, when he returned, sold the donkeys and goats, and gave the money to
the poor, promising to refund the same, if Lucy returned and gave
herself up to justice. But Lucy did not return; and her cottage, from
which the neighbors shrank as from a haunted place, remained as she had
left it, and crumbled slowly down to four fern-covered walls, past which
the little stream went murmuring on from pool to pool--the only voice,
for many a year to come, which broke the silence of that lonely glen.

A few days afterwards, Sir Richard, on his way from Bideford to Stow,
looked in at Cl