this
instant, afore you'd got the bacon out of your throats."

"A man? Never!" cried Parsons.

"How was it the dog didn't bark?" asked Hacker.

"How the devil do I know why he didn't bark?" answered Jonathan, dark as
night, and staring in the fire. One side of his face was red with the
flames, and t'other side blue as steel along of the daylight just
beginning to filter in at the window.

"All I can say is this," he added. "I turned in at half-after ten, just
after that brace of old fools to Brownberry went off to see the New Year
in. I slept till midnight; then something woke me with a start. What
'twas, I can't tell, but some loud sound near at hand, no doubt. I was
going off again when I heard more row--a steady sound repeated over and
over. And first I thought 'twas owls; and then I heard 'twas not. You
might have said 'twas somebody thumping on a barrel; but, at any rate, I
woke up, and sat up, and found the noise was in the yard.

"I looked out of my chamber window then, and the moon was bright as day,
and the stars sparkling likewise; and there, down by 'the Judge's Table'
where the thorn-tree grows, I see a man standing by the old barrel as
plain as I see you chaps now."

"The Judge's Table" be a wonnerful curiosity at Dunnabridge, and if you
go there you'll do well to ax to see it. 'Tis a gert slab of moorstone
said to have come from Crokern Torr, where the tinners held theer
parliament in the ancient times. Now it bides over a water-trough with a
white-thorn tree rising up above.

Jonathan took his breath when he'd got that far, and fetched his pipe
out of his pocket and lighted it. Then he drank off half the beer, and
spat in the fire, and went on.

"A man so tall as me, if not taller. He'd got one of them old white
beaver hats on his head, and he wore a flowing white beard, so long as
my plough-horse's tail, and he walked up and down, up and down over the
stones, like a sailor walks up and down on the deck of a ship. I shouted
to the chap, but he didn't take no more notice than the moon. Up and
down he went; and then I told him, if he wasn't off inside two minutes,
I'd get my fowling-piece and let fly. Still he paid no heed; and I don't
mind saying to you men that, for half a second, I felt creepy-crawly and
goose-flesh down the back. But 'twas only the cold, I reckon, for my
window was wide open, and I'd been leaning out of it for a good while
into ten degrees of frost.

"After that, I got angry,