e. But that was not the worst. The mare belonging to
the carrier postman (I knew him well, a decent quiet man, Henry Foster
by name) ran wide and wild, made a circuit of the Deep Moat property
and turned up in front of the school-house at Breckonside, the mail gig
all blood and leaves, just as the innocent bairns were going in to say
their morning's lessons.

"The rest of the business Jeremy had carried through well enough. He
had sculled the body of Foster, properly covered with bark and
brushwood, and laid it comfortably in the place intended for the
Lammermuir farmer. He had taken the mail bags, such as appeared to
have anything of value in them, turned them inside out, burned them in
his baker's furnace, and hidden away the rings (which he could not
melt) in some of his private _caches_.

"Yet when I asked him why he had done the deed at all, he would only
reply, 'I saw Harry passing by, just when I had done whetting my knife,
and I thought I would try it on him!'"

CHAPTER XXXVI

THE HOUSE OF DEATH

(_The last Testimony of Miser Hobby is continued and concluded_)

"It was in the days after the disappearance of Henry Foster, the
mail-post carrier between Bewick and Breckonside, that I became aware
of the increasing madness of those whom I had so rashly taken under my
roof and protection. The younger sisters, especially Honorine, thought
nothing of standing on walls screaming like peacocks, flapping their
arms, and declaring that they were winged angels, ready on a signal
from on high to fly upward into the blue. At such times Jeremy would
take to his fiddle and lock himself in the top rooms of the house,
especially affecting the tower chamber overlooking the Moat. He even
refused on several occasions to go to work, though the business
indicated was safe and remunerative enough. I had often observed with
great interest the home coming of young Jamie Caig, of Little
Springfield, a great taker of grass parks, a mighty dealer in
well-wintered sheep and fat bullocks. On one occasion I watched him
all the way from Longtown with the best part of a thousand pounds in
his pockets.

"I remember that he had on a shiny white mackintosh, and I thought he
would never leave the town, going into all sorts of foolish and
expensive cook shops and toy bazaars to buy trinkets and knick-knacks.

"Then, after all, at the arch of trees on the Pond Road where the way
narrows, there was no Jeremy--though I knew th