now, if you've took your tea, Silas, I'd have you tell
these chaps the story of Weaver Knowles, because you'll do it better than
what I can."

The old man sparked up a bit.

"For my part, knowing all I know, I never feared the Hound's Pool," he
said, "though a wisht place in the dimpsey and after dark as we know. But
when a lad I drew many a sizeable trout out of it--afore your time, John,
when it weren't poaching to fish there as it be now. Not that I ever see
the Hound; but I've known them that have, and if I don't grasp the truth
of the tale, who should, for my grandfather acksually knowed the son of
old Weaver Knowles, and he heard it from the man's own lips, and I heard
it from grandfather when he was eighty-nine year old and I was ten."

"Then we shall have gospel truth for certain," said Harry Wade, with his
eyes on Millicent Meadows.

"Oh, yes," answered Silas, "because my grandfather could call home the
taking of Canada and many such like far-off things, so that shows you the
sort of memory he'd gotten. But nowadays the learning of the past be
flouted a good bit and what our fathers have told us don't carry no weight
at all. Holy spells and ghostesses and--"

"You get on to Hound Pool, Silas," said John Meadows, "because Parsloe
will have to go to his work in ten minutes."

"The solemn truth be easily told," declared Mr. Belchamber. "Back along in
dim history there was a weaver by name of Knowles who lived to Dean Combe.
Him and his son did very well together and he was a widower with no care
but for his work. Old Weaver, he stuck to his yarn and was a silent and
lonely fashion of man by all accounts. Work was his god, and 'twas said he
sat at his loom eighteen hours out of every twenty-four. Then, coming home
one evening, the man's son heard the loom was still and went in and found
old Knowles fallen forward on the top of his work, dead. So they buried
him at Buckfastleigh.

"Then young Knowles, coming home to his empty house after the funeral,
suddenly heard the music of the loom and thought his ears had played him
false. But the loom hummed on and he crept up over to see who was weaving.
In a pretty good rage he was, no doubt, to think of such a thing; but then
his blood turned from hot to cold very quick, I warn 'e, for there was his
father sitting on the old seat and working weft through warp as suent and
clever as if he was alive!

"Well, young Knowles he glared upon his dead parent and felt the