emme_ of this wild domain.
She has renounced practice, however, for some years; and now, under
the rose, she dabbles, it is thought, in the black art, in which she
has always been secretly skilled, tells fortunes, practises charms,
and in popular esteem is little better than a witch.

Mother Carke has been away to the town of Willarden, to sell knit
stockings, and is returning to her rude dwelling by Dardale Moss. To
her right, as far away as the eye can reach, the moor stretches. The
narrow track she has followed here tops a gentle upland, and at her
left a sort of jungle of dwarf-oak and brushwood approaches its edge.
The sun is sinking blood-red in the west. His disk has touched the
broad black level of the moor, and his parting beams glare athwart the
gaunt figure of the old beldame, as she strides homeward stick in
hand, and bring into relief the folds of her mantle, which gleam like
the draperies of a bronze image in the light of a fire. For a few
moments this light floods the air--tree, gorse, rock, and bracken
glare; and then it is out, and gray twilight over everything.

All is still and sombre. At this hour the simple traffic of the
thinly-peopled country is over, and nothing can be more solitary.

From this jungle, nevertheless, through which the mists of evening are
already creeping, she sees a gigantic man approaching her.

In that poor and primitive country robbery is a crime unknown. She,
therefore, has no fears for her pound of tea, and pint of gin, and
sixteen shillings in silver which she is bringing home in her pocket.
But there is something that would have frighted another woman about
this man.

He is gaunt, sombre, bony, dirty, and dressed in a black suit which a
beggar would hardly care to pick out of the dust.

This ill-looking man nodded to her as he stepped on the road.

"I don't know you," she said.

He nodded again.

"I never sid ye neyawheere," she exclaimed sternly.

"Fine evening, Mother Carke," he says, and holds his snuff-box toward
her.

She widened the distance between them by a step or so, and said again
sternly and pale,

"I hev nowt to say to thee, whoe'er thou beest."

"You know Laura Silver Bell?"

"That's a byneyam; the lass's neyam is Laura Lew," she answered,
looking straight before her.

"One name's as good as another for one that was never christened,
mother."

"How know ye that?" she asked grimly; for it is a received opinion in
that part of the world th