which added to his gloom. About a yard
away, in rear of the tree, behind himself, and extending to his left,
was an open grave, the mould and rubbish piled on the other side. At
the head of this grave stood the beech-tree; its columnar stem rose
like a huge monumental pillar. He knew every line and crease on its
smooth surface. The initial letters of his own name, cut in its bark
long ago, had spread out and wrinkled like the grotesque capitals of a
fanciful engraver, and now with a sinister significance overlooked the
open grave, as if answering his mental question, "Who for is t' grave
cut?"

He felt still a little stunned, and there was a faint tremor in his
joints that disinclined him to exert himself; and, further, he had a
vague apprehension that take what direction he might, there was danger
around him worse than that of staying where he was.

On a sudden the stars began to blink more fiercely, a faint wild light
overspread for a minute the bleak landscape, and he saw approaching
from the moor a figure at a kind of swinging trot, with now and then a
zig-zag hop or two, such as men accustomed to cross such places make,
to avoid the patches of slob or quag that meet them here and there.
This figure resembled his father's, and like him, whistled through his
finger by way of signal as he approached; but the whistle sounded not
now shrilly and sharp, as in old times, but immensely far away, and
seemed to sing strangely through Tom's head. From habit or from fear,
in answer to the signal, Tom whistled as he used to do five-and-twenty
years ago and more, although he was already chilled with an unearthly
fear.

Like his father, too, the figure held up the bag that was in his left
hand as he drew near, when it was his custom to call out to him what
was in it. It did not reassure the watcher, you may be certain, when a
shout unnaturally faint reached him, as the phantom dangled the bag
in the air, and he heard with a faint distinctness the words, "Tom
Chuff's soul!"

Scarcely fifty yards away from the low churchyard fence at which Tom
was standing, there was a wider chasm in the peat, which there threw
up a growth of reeds and bulrushes, among which, as the old poacher
used to do on a sudden alarm, the approaching figure suddenly cast
itself down.

From the same patch of tall reeds and rushes emerged instantaneously
what he at first mistook for the same figure creeping on all-fours,
but what he soon perceived to be