h the old toad. I'll put a spell on her."

"It must boil in time," protested Crefton, ignoring the suggestions of
foul influences. "Perhaps the coal is damp."

"It won't boil in time for supper, nor for breakfast to-morrow morning,
not if you was to keep the fire a-going all night for it," said Mrs.
Spurfield. And it didn't. The household subsisted on fried and baked
dishes, and a neighbour obligingly brewed tea and sent it across in a
moderately warm condition.

"I suppose you'll be leaving us, now that things has turned up
uncomfortable," Mrs. Spurfield observed at breakfast; "there are folks
as deserts one as soon as trouble comes."

Crefton hurriedly disclaimed any immediate change of plans; he
observed, however, to himself that the earlier heartiness of manner had
in a large measure deserted the household. Suspicious looks, sulky
silences, or sharp speeches had become the order of the day. As for
the old mother, she sat about the kitchen or the garden all day,
murmuring threats and spells against Martha Pillamon. There was
something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail
old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to
the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one
faculty which had survived in undiminished vigour and intensity where
all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the
uncanny part of it was that some horrid unwholesome power seemed to be
distilled from their spite and their cursings. No amount of sceptical
explanation could remove the undoubted fact that neither kettle nor
saucepan would come to boiling-point over the hottest fire. Crefton
clung as long as possible to the theory of some defect in the coals,
but a wood fire gave the same result, and when a small spirit-lamp
kettle, which he ordered out by carrier, showed the same obstinate
refusal to allow its contents to boil he felt that he had come suddenly
into contact with some unguessed-at and very evil aspect of hidden
forces. Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could
catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet
here, so little removed from the arteries of the latest civilization,
was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like
witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.

Passing out through the farm garden on his way to the lanes beyond,
where he hoped to recapture the comfortable sens