ch-tree
hung, precariously rooted; and here the old outlaw, pulling aside some
bushy underwood, bodily disappeared into the earth.

The beech had, in some violent gale, been half-uprooted, and had torn up
a considerable stretch of turf and it was under this that old Lawless had
dug out his forest hiding-place. The roots served him for rafters, the
turf was his thatch; for walls and floor he had his mother the earth.
Rude as it was, the hearth in one corner, blackened by fire, and the
presence in another of a large oaken chest well fortified with iron,
showed it at one glance to be the den of a man, and not the burrow of a
digging beast.

Though the snow had drifted at the mouth and sifted in upon the floor of
this earth cavern, yet was the air much warmer than without; and when
Lawless had struck a spark, and the dry furze bushes had begun to blaze
and crackle on the hearth, the place assumed, even to the eye, an air of
comfort and of home.

With a sigh of great contentment, Lawless spread his broad hands before
the fire, and seemed to breathe the smoke.

"Here, then," he said, "is this old Lawless's rabbit-hole; pray Heaven
there come no terrier! Far I have rolled hither and thither, and here
and about, since that I was fourteen years of mine age and first ran away
from mine abbey, with the sacrist's gold chain and a mass-book that I
sold for four marks. I have been in England and France and Burgundy, and
in Spain, too, on a pilgrimage for my poor soul; and upon the sea, which
is no man's country. But here is my place, Master Shelton. This is my
native land, this burrow in the earth! Come rain or wind--and whether
it's April, and the birds all sing, and the blossoms fall about my
bed--or whether it's winter, and I sit alone with my good gossip the
fire, and robin red breast twitters in the woods--here, is my church and
market, and my wife and child. It's here I come back to, and it's here,
so please the saints, that I would like to die."

"'Tis a warm corner, to be sure," replied Dick, "and a pleasant, and a
well hid."

"It had need to be," returned Lawless, "for an they found it, Master
Shelton, it would break my heart. But here," he added, burrowing with
his stout fingers in the sandy floor, "here is my wine cellar; and ye
shall have a flask of excellent strong stingo."

Sure enough, after but a little digging, he produced a big leathern
bottle of about a gallon, nearly three-parts full of a very head