'I'm damned if I didn't think so!' murmured Marchmill. 'Then she did
play me false with that fellow at the lodgings! Let me see: the
dates--the second week in August . . . the third week in May . . . Yes .
. . yes . . . Get away, you poor little brat! You are nothing to me!'

1893.

THE THREE STRANGERS

Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an appearance
but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be reckoned the high,
grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as they are indifferently
called, that fill a large area of certain counties in the south and south-
west. If any mark of human occupation is met with hereon, it usually
takes the form of the solitary cottage of some shepherd.

Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may
possibly be standing there now. In spite of its loneliness, however, the
spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five miles from a county-
town. Yet that affected it little. Five miles of irregular upland,
during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains, and
mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a
Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less repellent
tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who 'conceive and
meditate of pleasant things.'

Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some
starved fragment of ancient hedge is usually taken advantage of in the
erection of these forlorn dwellings. But, in the present case, such a
kind of shelter had been disregarded. Higher Crowstairs, as the house
was called, stood quite detached and undefended. The only reason for its
precise situation seemed to be the crossing of two footpaths at right
angles hard by, which may have crossed there and thus for a good five
hundred years. Hence the house was exposed to the elements on all sides.
But, though the wind up here blew unmistakably when it did blow, and the
rain hit hard whenever it fell, the various weathers of the winter season
were not quite so formidable on the coomb as they were imagined to be by
dwellers on low ground. The raw rimes were not so pernicious as in the
hollows, and the frosts were scarcely so severe. When the shepherd and
his family who tenanted the house were pitied for their sufferings from
the exposure, they said that upon the whole they were less inconvenienced
by 'wuzzes and flames' (hoarses and phlegms) th