ch was there to see and hear.
There was the gibbet on the hill, for example, far up on the rim of the
green basin, four hundred feet above the village; why had that memorial,
that symbol of a dreadful past, been preserved for so many years and
generations? and why had it been raised so high--was it because the
crime of the person put to death there was of so monstrous a nature that
it was determined to suspend him, if not on a gibbet fifty cubits high,
at all events higher above the earth than Haman the son of Hammedatha
the Agagite? The gruesome story is as follows.

Once upon a time there lived a poor widow woman in Coombe, with two
sons, aged fourteen and sixteen, who worked at a farm in the village.
She had a lover, a middle-aged man, living at Woodhay, a carrier who
used to go on two or three days each week with his cart to deliver
parcels at Coombe. But he was a married man, and as he could not marry
the widow while his wife remained alive, it came into his dull Berkshire
brain that the only way out of the difficulty was to murder her, and
to this course the widow probably consented. Accordingly, one day, he
invited or persuaded her to accompany him on his journey to the remote
village, and on the way he got her out of the cart and led her into a
close thicket to show her something he had discovered there. What
he wished to show her (according to one version of the story) was a
populous hornets' nest, and having got her there he suddenly flung her
against it and made off, leaving the cloud of infuriated hornets to
sting her to death. That night he slept at Coombe, or stayed till a
very late hour at the widow's cottage and told her what he had done.
In telling her he had spoken in his ordinary voice, but by and by it
occurred to him that the two boys, who were sleeping close by in the
living-room, might have been awake and listening. She assured him that
they were both fast asleep, but he was not satisfied, and said that if
they had heard him he would kill them both, as he had no wish to swing,
and he could not trust them to hold their tongues. Thereupon they got up
and examined the faces of the two boys, holding a candle over them,
and saw that they were in a deep sleep, as was natural after their long
day's hard work on the farm, and the murderer's fears were set at rest.
Yet one of the boys, the younger, had been wide awake all the time,
listening, trembling with terror, with wide eyes to the dreadful tale,
and