“Be quiet there,” cried Ralph.  “Down, Laddie, down.”  Laddie, a large-limbed collie, with long shaggy coat still wet and matted and glistening with the hard unmelted snow, had walked to the door and put his nose to the bottom of it.

“Some one coming,” said Ralph, turning to look at the dog, and speaking almost under his breath.

Robbie Anderson, who had throughout been lounging in silence on the bench near the door, got up sleepily, and put his great hand on the wooden latch.  The door flew open by the force of the storm outside.  He peered for a moment into the darkness through the blinding sleet.  He could see nothing.

“No one here!” he said moodily.

And, putting his broad shoulder to the stout oak door, he forced it back.  The wind moaned and hissed through the closing aperture.  It was like the ebb of a broken wave to those who had heard the sea.  Turning about, as the candles on the table blinked, the young man lazily dashed the rain and sleet from his beard and breast, and lay down again on the settle, with something between a shiver and a yawn.  “Cruel night, this,” he muttered, and so saying, he returned to his normal condition of somnolence.

The opening and the closing of the door, together with the draught of cold air, had awakened a little man who occupied that corner of the chimney nook which faced old Matthew.  Coiled up with his legs under him on the warm stone seat, his head resting against one of the two walls that bolstered him up on either hand, beneath a great flitch of bacon that hung there to dry, he had lain asleep throughout the preceding conversation, only punctuating its periods at intervals with somewhat too audible indications of slumber.  In an instant he was on his feet.  He was a diminutive creature, with something infinitely amusing in his curious physical proportions.  His head was large and well formed; his body was large and ill formed; his legs were short and shrunken.  He was the schoolmaster of Wythburn, and his name Monsey Laman.  The dalesmen found the little schoolmaster the merriest comrade that ever sat with them over a glass.  He had a crack for each of them, a song, a joke, a lively touch that cut and meant no harm.  They called him “the little limber Frenchman,” in allusion to a peculiarity of gait which in the minds of the heavy-limbed mountaineers was somehow associated with the idea of a French dancing master.

With the schoolmaster’s awakening the conversation in the inn seemed likely to take a livelier turn.  Even the whistling sleet appeared to become less fierce and terrible.  True, the stalwart dalesman on the door bench yawned and slept as before; but even Ralph’s firm lower lip began to relax, and he was never a gay and sportive elf.  The rest of the company charged their pipes afresh and called on the hostess for more spiced ale.

“‘Blessing on your heart,’ says the proverb, ‘you brew good ale.’  It’s a Christian virtue, eh, Father?” said Monsey, addressing Matthew in the opposite corner.