motion. Taking his pipe out of his
mouth, and with the shank of it marking time to the doggerel, he
said,--

"Wheariver there's screes
There's mair stones nor trees."

The further sally provoked a louder laugh. Just then another gust came
down the chimney and sent a wave of mingled heat and cold through the
room. The windows rattled louder with the wind and crackled sharper
with the pelting sleet. The dogs rose and growled.

"Be quiet there," cried Ralph. "Down, Laddie, down." Laddie, a
large-limbed collie, with long shaggy coat still wet and matted and
glistening with the hard unmelted snow, had walked to the door and put
his nose to the bottom of it.

"Some one coming," said Ralph, turning to look at the dog, and
speaking almost under his breath.

Robbie Anderson, who had throughout been lounging in silence on the
bench near the door, got up sleepily, and put his great hand on the
wooden latch. The door flew open by the force of the storm outside. He
peered for a moment into the darkness through the blinding sleet. He
could see nothing.

"No one here!" he said moodily.

And, putting his broad shoulder to the stout oak door, he forced it
back. The wind moaned and hissed through the closing aperture. It was
like the ebb of a broken wave to those who had heard the sea. Turning
about, as the candles on the table blinked, the young man lazily
dashed the rain and sleet from his beard and breast, and lay down
again on the settle, with something between a shiver and a yawn.
"Cruel night, this," he muttered, and so saying, he returned to his
normal condition of somnolence.

The opening and the closing of the door, together with the draught of
cold air, had awakened a little man who occupied that corner of the
chimney nook which faced old Matthew. Coiled up with his legs under
him on the warm stone seat, his head resting against one of the two
walls that bolstered him up on either hand, beneath a great flitch of
bacon that hung there to dry, he had lain asleep throughout the
preceding conversation, only punctuating its periods at intervals with
somewhat too audible indications of slumber. In an instant he was on
his feet. He was a diminutive creature, with something infinitely
amusing in his curious physical proportions. His head was large and
well formed; his body was large and ill formed; his legs were short
and shrunken. He was the schoolmaster of Wythburn, and his name Monsey
Laman. The dalesmen found t