e watch for armed companies
approaching either to succour or to attack.

I am startled by a voice pronouncing my name. Past and present have
become so confusedly mingled under the associations of the spot that for
a time it has escaped my memory that this mound was the place agreed on
for the aforesaid appointment. I turn and behold my friend. He stands
with a dark lantern in his hand and a spade and light pickaxe over his
shoulder. He expresses both delight and surprise that I have come. I
tell him I had set out before the bad weather began.

He, to whom neither weather, darkness, nor difficulty seems to have any
relation or significance, so entirely is his soul wrapped up in his own
deep intentions, asks me to take the lantern and accompany him. I take
it and walk by his side. He is a man about sixty, small in figure, with
grey old-fashioned whiskers cut to the shape of a pair of crumb-brushes.
He is entirely in black broadcloth--or rather, at present, black and
brown, for he is bespattered with mud from his heels to the crown of his
low hat. He has no consciousness of this--no sense of anything but his
purpose, his ardour for which causes his eyes to shine like those of a
lynx, and gives his motions, all the elasticity of an athlete's.

'Nobody to interrupt us at this time of night!' he chuckles with fierce
enjoyment.

We retreat a little way and find a sort of angle, an elevation in the
sod, a suggested squareness amid the mass of irregularities around. Here,
he tells me, if anywhere, the king's house stood. Three months of
measurement and calculation have confirmed him in this conclusion.

He requests me now to open the lantern, which I do, and the light streams
out upon the wet sod. At last divining his proceedings I say that I had
no idea, in keeping the tryst, that he was going to do more at such an
unusual time than meet me for a meditative ramble through the stronghold.
I ask him why, having a practicable object, he should have minded
interruptions and not have chosen the day? He informs me, quietly
pointing to his spade, that it was because his purpose is to dig, then
signifying with a grim nod the gaunt notice-post against the sky beyond.
I inquire why, as a professed and well-known antiquary with capital
letters at the tail of his name, he did not obtain the necessary
authority, considering the stringent penalties for this sort of thing;
and he chuckles fiercely again with suppressed delight