ion was
not of an unprofitable kind, inasmuch as alms were commonly rendered,
though more from fear than favour. Woe betide the unlucky housewife
who withheld her dole, her modicum of meal or money to these sturdy
applicants! Mischief from some invisible hand was sure to follow, and
the cause was laid to her lack of charity.

The being, the subject of these remarks, had been for many months a
periodical visitor at the Hall, where he went by the name of "Noman."
It is not a little remarkable that tradition should here point out an
adventure something analogous to that of Ulysses with the Cyclop as
once happening to this obscure individual, and that his escape was
owing to the same absurd equivoque by which the Grecian chief escaped
from his tormentor. Our tale, however, hath reference to weightier
matters, and the brief space we possess permits no further digression.
This aged but hale and sturdy beggar wore a grey frieze coat or cloak
loosely about his person. Long blue stocking gaiters, well patched and
darned, came over his knee, while his doublet and hosen, or body-gear,
were fastened together by the primitive attachment of wooden
skewers--a contrivance now obsolete, being superseded by others more
elegant and seemly. A woollen cap or bonnet, of unparalleled form and
dimensions, was disposed upon his head, hiding the upper part of his
face, and almost covering a pair of bushy grey eyebrows, that, in
their turn, crouched over a quick and vagrant eye, little the worse
for the wear of probably some sixty years. A grizzled reddish beard
hung upon his breast; and his aspect altogether was forbidding, almost
ferocious. A well-plenished satchel was on his shoulder; and he walked
slowly and erect, as though little disposed to make way for his
betters in the narrow path, where they must inevitably meet. When they
came nearer he stood still in the middle of the road, as though
inclined to dispute their passage. His tall and well-proportioned
figure, apparent even beneath these grotesque habiliments, stood out
before them in bold relief against the red and burning sky, where an
opening in the lane admitted all the glow and fervour of the western
sunset. His strange, wayward, and even mysterious character was no bar
to his admittance into the mansions of the gentry through a wide
circuit of country, where his familiarities were tolerated, or perhaps
connived at, even by many whose gifts he received more as a right than
as an ob