nfluence of years--occurred
in the beautiful little town of Golden Friars, and signalized, as the
scene of its catastrophe, the old inn known throughout a wide region
of the Northumbrian counties as the George and Dragon.

Toby Crooke, the sexton, was lying dead in the old coach-house in the
inn yard. The body had been discovered, only half an hour before this
story begins, under strange circumstances, and in a place where it
might have lain the better part of a week undisturbed; and a dreadful
suspicion astounded the village of Golden Friars.

A wintry sunset was glaring through a gorge of the western mountains,
turning into fire the twigs of the leafless elms, and all the tiny
blades of grass on the green by which the quaint little town is
surrounded. It is built of light, grey stone, with steep gables and
slender chimneys rising with airy lightness from the level sward by
the margin of the beautiful lake, and backed by the grand amphitheatre
of the fells at the other side, whose snowy peaks show faintly against
the sky, tinged with the vaporous red of the western light. As you
descend towards the margin of the lake, and see Golden Friars, its
taper chimneys and slender gables, its curious old inn and gorgeous
sign, and over all the graceful tower and spire of the ancient church,
at this hour or by moonlight, in the solemn grandeur and stillness of
the natural scenery that surrounds it, it stands before you like a
fairy town.

Toby Crooke, the lank sexton, now fifty or upwards, had passed an hour
or two with some village cronies, over a solemn pot of purl, in the
kitchen of that cosy hostelry, the night before. He generally turned
in there at about seven o'clock, and heard the news. This contented
him: for he talked little, and looked always surly.

Many things are now raked up and talked over about him.

In early youth, he had been a bit of a scamp. He broke his indentures,
and ran away from his master, the tanner of Bryemere; he had got into
fifty bad scrapes and out again; and, just as the little world of
Golden Friars had come to the conclusion that it would be well for all
parties--except, perhaps, himself--and a happy riddance for his
afflicted mother, if he were sunk, with a gross of quart pots about
his neck, in the bottom of the lake in which the grey gables, the
elms, and the towering fells of Golden Friars are mirrored, he
suddenly returned, a reformed man at the ripe age of forty.

For twelve years