hat white-haired man. Not that he is
rough with them, or querulous, or rebukeful; but that he has a strange
soft smile, and a gaze they cannot answer, and a knowledge deeper far
than they have of themselves. Under his protection, I am as safe from
all those men (some of whom are but little akin to me) as if I slept
beneath the roof of the King's Lord Justiciary.

"But now, at the time I speak of, one evening of last summer, a horrible
thing befell, which took all play of childhood from me. The fifteenth
day of last July was very hot and sultry, long after the time of
sundown; and I was paying heed of it, because of the old saying that if
it rain then, rain will fall on forty days thereafter. I had been long
by the waterside at this lower end of the valley, plaiting a little
crown of woodbine crocketed with sprigs of heath--to please my
grandfather, who likes to see me gay at supper-time. Being proud of my
tiara, which had cost some trouble, I set it on my head at once, to save
the chance of crushing, and carrying my gray hat, ventured by a path not
often trod. For I must be home at the supper-time, or grandfather
would be exceeding wrath; and the worst of his anger is that he never
condescends to show it.

"Therefore, instead of the open mead, or the windings of the river, I
made short cut through the ash-trees covert which lies in the middle of
our vale, with the water skirting or cleaving it. You have never been
up so far as that--at least to the best of my knowledge--but you see it
like a long gray spot, from the top of the cliffs above us. Here I was
not likely to meet any of our people because the young ones are afraid
of some ancient tale about it, and the old ones have no love of trees
where gunshots are uncertain.

"It was more almost than dusk, down below the tree-leaves, and I was
eager to go through, and be again beyond it. For the gray dark hung
around me, scarcely showing shadow; and the little light that glimmered
seemed to come up from the ground. For the earth was strown with the
winter-spread and coil of last year's foliage, the lichened claws
of chalky twigs, and the numberless decay which gives a light in its
decaying. I, for my part, hastened shyly, ready to draw back and run
from hare, or rabbit, or small field-mouse.

"At a sudden turn of the narrow path, where it stopped again to the
river, a man leaped out from behind a tree, and stopped me, and seized
hold of me. I tried to shriek, but my vo