st in our own neighbourhood, nor even to speak of it near home. But
the east wind holding through the month, my hands and face growing worse
and worse, and it having occurred to me by this time that possibly Lorna
might have chaps, if she came abroad at all, and so might like to talk
about them and show her little hands to me, I resolved to take another
opinion, so far as might be upon this matter, without disclosing the
circumstances.

Now the wisest person in all our parts was reckoned to be a certain wise
woman, well known all over Exmoor by the name of Mother Melldrum. Her
real name was Maple Durham, as I learned long afterwards; and she came
of an ancient family, but neither of Devon nor Somerset. Nevertheless
she was quite at home with our proper modes of divination; and knowing
that we liked them best--as each man does his own religion--she would
always practise them for the people of the country. And all the while,
she would let us know that she kept a higher and nobler mode for those
who looked down upon this one, not having been bred and born to it.

[Illustration: 142.jpg Mother Melldrum]

Mother Melldrum had two houses, or rather she had none at all, but two
homes wherein to find her, according to the time of year. In summer she
lived in a pleasant cave, facing the cool side of the hill, far inland
near Hawkridge and close above Tarr-steps, a wonderful crossing of Barle
river, made (as everybody knows) by Satan, for a wager. But throughout
the winter, she found sea-air agreeable, and a place where things could
be had on credit, and more occasion of talking. Not but what she could
have credit (for every one was afraid of her) in the neighbourhood of
Tarr-steps; only there was no one handy owning things worth taking.

Therefore, at the fall of the leaf, when the woods grew damp and
irksome, the wise woman always set her face to the warmer cliffs of the
Channel; where shelter was, and dry fern bedding, and folk to be seen in
the distance, from a bank upon which the sun shone. And there, as I
knew from our John Fry (who had been to her about rheumatism, and sheep
possessed with an evil spirit, and warts on the hand of his son, young
John), any one who chose might find her, towards the close of a winter
day, gathering sticks and brown fern for fuel, and talking to herself
the while, in a hollow stretch behind the cliffs; which foreigners, who
come and go without seeing much of Exmoor, have called the Valley of