ity all their
endeavours to deceive, nor would he credit their belief, unless it were
confirmed by the testimony of an eye-witness. How to procure this
desirable source of intelligence was a question that was hourly becoming
more difficult to solve.

Slow and melancholy was their return, while with fear and hesitation
they communicated the result.

"Now, shame befall thee, Adam of Wills!" said a stout woman, to one of
the speakers; "thou wert ever a tough fighter; and the cudgel and ragged
staff were as glib in thine hands as a beggar's pouch on alms-days. Show
thy mettle, man. I'll spice thee a jug of barley-drink, an' thou be for
the bout this time."

"Nay," returned Adam, "I 'll fight Beelzebub if he be aught I can hit;
but these same boggarts, they say, a blow falls on 'em like rain-drops
on a mist, or like beating the wind with a corn-flail. I cannot fight
with naught, as it were."

"Shame on thee, Hal!" said a shrill-tongued, crooked little body,
arrayed in a coarse grey hood, and holding a stick, like unto a
one-handed crutch, of enormous dimensions. "Shame on thee! I would watch
myself, but the night-wind sits indifferently on my stomach, and I am
too old now for these moonshine lifts."

She cast her little bleared eyes, half-shut and distilling contempt, on
the cowardly bystanders.

"Now, if there be not old Cicely," first went round in a whisper; then a
deep silence gradually pervaded the assembly.

She had just hobbled down to the cross, and the audience seemed to watch
her looks with awe and suspicion.

"What, none o' ye? Come, Uctred, thou shalt shame these big-tongued,
wide-mouthed boasters."

A short swarthy-looking boy, with a leering and unfavourable
countenance, here stepped forward, taking his station upon one of the
steps beside his mother. A notion had gone abroad that the boy was the
fruit of some unhallowed intercourse with an immortal of the fairy or
pixy kind, whose illicit amours the old woman had wickedly indulged. She
too, was thought to bear in some degree a charmed life, and to hold
communion with intelligences not of the most holy or reputable order.
The boy was dumb. His lips had, however, at times a slight and tremulous
movement, which strongly impressed the beholders that some discourse was
then carrying on between "the dummy," as he was generally called, and
his invisible relatives. His whole aspect was singularly painful and
forbidding. No wonder, in these times of debasin