d hither across the seas of
its own will. No! 'Ware shadows, I say." And so he continued harping
on the word, till the landlord fetched in the bill.

The landlord had his dissuasions too, but they availed not a jot more
than Mr. Mitchelbourne's.

"The road is as black as a pauper's coffin," said he, "and damnable
with ruts."

"So much the better," said Lance.

"There is no house where you can sleep nearer than Glemham, and no man
would sleep there could he kennel elsewhere."

"So much the better," said Lance. "Besides, I am expected to-morrow
evening at 'The Porch' and Glemham is on the way." He paid his bill,
slipped over to the stables and lent a hand to the saddling of his
horse. Mitchelbourne, though for once in his life he regretted the
precipitancy with which he welcomed strangers, was still sufficiently
provoked to see the business to its end. His imagination was seized by
the thought of this fat and vulgar person fleeing in terror through
English lanes from a Barbary Moor. He had now a conjecture in his mind
as to the nature of that greenish seed. He accordingly rode out with
Lance toward Glemham.

It was a night of extraordinary blackness; you could not distinguish
a hedge until the twigs stung across your face; the road was narrow,
great tree-trunks with bulging roots lined it, at times it was very
steep--and, besides and beyond every other discomfort, there was the
rain. It fell pitilessly straight over the face of the country with a
continuous roar as though the earth was a hollow drum. Both travellers
were drenched to the skin before they were free of Saxmundham, and one
of them, when after midnight they stumbled into the poor tumble-down
parody of a tavern at Glemham, was in an extreme exhaustion. It was no
more than an ague, said Lance, from which he periodically suffered,
but the two men slept in the same bare room, and towards morning
Mitchelbourne was awakened from a deep slumber by an unfamiliar voice
talking at an incredible speed through the darkness in an uncouth
tongue. He started up upon his elbow; the voice came from Lance's bed.
He struck a light. Lance was in a high fever, which increased as the
morning grew.

Now, whether he had the sickness latent within him when he came from
Barbary, or whether his anxieties and corpulent habit made him an
easy victim to disease, neither the doctor nor any one else could
determine. But at twelve o'clock that day Lance was seized with an
attack of