the talk
of they country for a generation or longer. The two wretches having been
hanged in chains on one gibbet were left to be eaten by ravens, crows,
and magpipes, and dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the
swinging, creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and
were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never removed.

Then a strange thing happened. The sheep on a neighbouring farm became
thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died before their time. No
remedies availed and the secret of their malady could not be discovered;
but it went on so long that the farmer was threatened with utter
ruin. Then, by chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the
murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded person
into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the cause of the
malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains having been taken out
of the pond and buried deep in the earth, the flock recovered: it was
supposed that the person who had thrown the chains in the water to
poison it had done so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice
or grudge. But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many,
many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old documents that
their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had taken more land than
she was entitled to, that not only a part but the whole of that noble
hill-top belonged to her! It was Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she
chuckled too soon, and Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten
stump of the gibbet still in the ground. Hands off! she cried. Here
stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up together
and agreed that this should be the boundary line for ever. Inkpen
sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and Coombe, determined to
keep the subject in mind, set up a brand-new stout gibbet in the place
of the old rotting one. That too decayed and fell to pieces in time,
and the present gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever
been hanged on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that
Inkpen is.

That was one of three strange events in the life of the village which I
heard: the other two must be passed by; they would take long to tell and
require a good pen to do them justice. To me the best thing in or of the
village was the vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe
a nature, so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect str