a child. He generally did this when
Aphra whipped him. But in half an hour I would find him again among
the lily beds, his hands all bound up in fingerless gloves, but his ear
close down against the earth.

"'Wheesht--wheesht!' he would whisper, putting up a linen-wrapped stump
to stay me. 'Listen to them knocking--they are knocking to get oot.
Jeremy can hear them!'

"And though I raised him with the toe of my boot and made him be off
into the house, yet his words shook my nerves so that I had to go into
the weaving-chamber, where I was not myself till I had taken a good
long spell at the loom.

"After some of the later disappearances, notably that of Harry
Foster--for, as he was in some sort a public servant wearing a uniform,
the postman's case received attention out of all proportion to its
importance--the police would come about us, asking questions and taking
down notes and references. There was nothing serious in that, though I
was even asked to justify my _alibi_ by giving the employ of my time
during the day previous to 'the unfortunate occurrence'--unfortunate,
indeed, for me and for all concerned--Harry Foster included. As,
however, I had both lunched and supped with my old friend and lawyer,
Mr. Gillison Kilhilt, and afterwards slept at his house, I could not
have been more innocent if I had done the same with the Queen herself,
God bless her!

"But it was not the police, rate-supported and by law established (whom
I have always encouraged and aided in every possible way, entertaining
them, and facilitating their researches and departures), that annoyed
me. The little, mean, paltry spying of Breckonside and the
neighbourhood was infinitely more difficult to bear.

"For instance, there was a boy--a youth, I suppose I should call
him--one Joseph Yarrow, upon whose rich father I had long had my eye.
If it had not been that he generally came in the company of my own
granddaughter Elsie, his neck would soon enough have been twisted. But
as it was, he put us to an enormous amount of trouble. One never knew
when he would be spying about, and once, by an unfortunate mistake of
my own, I introduced my granddaughter and this intrusive young
good-for-nothing into a barn of which our mad people had been making a
kind of chapel of Beelzebub.

"There was also a High-Church clergyman--a kind of mission priest, I
think he called himself--come north with a friend to convert the
Scotch. He took it into his h