ened her
pace, and looked furtively around. Then she went on more quickly again;
but, in a few moments, a slight bend in the road brought before her a
sight at which she stopped short and uttered a cry of alarm. An
exceedingly ill-favoured man, and a no more prepossessing woman, were
sitting upon the bank, by the road-side, discussing a dinner of broken
victuals. They were thorough-going tramps, of middle age. Marian would
have fled; but their evil eyes held her to the spot.

"What a pretty little lady!" said the man, holding out a very dirty hand.
"Come here, missy!"

But Marian shrank back with a smothered cry.

"I've finished my dinner, I have," said the man, getting up.

"So have I," echoed the woman, following his example; "and we'll go for
a walk with little miss."

"What a precious lonely road!" she remarked, when she had glanced this way
and that, to make sure that no prying eyes were near. "Catch hold o' the
little 'un, Jake; and we'll take a stroll in the fields."

There was a perfect understanding between this precious pair; and Marian
was promptly lifted over a five-barred gate, and led by the woman across
a grass field, towards a wood on the other side, while the man followed
stolidly in the rear. A few paces from the gate Marian's shoe came off;
but she was as much too frightened to say anything about it, as she was to
ask any questions of her captors, or to resist their will. Having reached
the wood, they plunged into its recesses, and at length halted before a
large pool, at the edge of which there lay upon the ground the trunks of
some trees which had been cut down. Taking her seat on one of these, the
woman drew Marian to her side, and, while the man stood by with an evil
smile, proceeded to strip off some of the child's clothes. Marian began to
cry, but was silenced with a rough shake and a threat of being thrown into
the pond. Having divested the child of most of her garments, the woman
took from a dirty bundle which she carried a draggled grey wool shawl,
which she wrapped tightly, crosswise, around Marian's body, and tied in
a hard knot behind her back.

Perceiving that Marian had lost one of her shoes, the hag sent her
husband back to look for it, while she proceeded with the metamorphosis
of the hapless infant who had fallen into her hands. She smeared the
little face with muddy water from the margin of the pool; she jerked out
the semi-circular comb which held back Marian's cloud of dusky