“Mercy on me! my days are numbered.  If it should indeed be this incarnate,—­forgive the thought!—­we are all dead creatures.  The very horses and kine stagger, and fall into fits at times, when they come home, and it is all along of ’em having seen or smelt the brimstone from the pit.  Davy had two died last week, and he was sure they had either seen the deil or his deputy,—­this same grey man of the woods.  Woe’s me that I should ha’ lived to behold this child of perdition!” The old woman here gave way to an outburst of sorrow, that prevented any further disclosures.

“It is about a three month agone since this same wild man was first seen,” said the old seneschal, whose office, though of little use, was still filled up in the more ancient establishments.  “I saw him myself once, but I shook until the very flesh seemed to crawl over my bones.  They say he neither eats nor drinks, but is kept alive in the body by glamour and witchcraft.  He’ll stay here until his time is done, and then his tormentors will fetch him to his prison-house again.  Ye should not have tarried in the wood after sunset.”

“That would I not,” sharply replied Agnes; “but the child, poor thing, would look at the daylight as it lingered on the hill-top, and I thought no harm in’t.”

“Like enough.  He dares not abroad, if so much as the value or size of my thumb-nail of the sun’s rim were left above the hill!”

“Come, Gaffer, strike up a merry trowl,” said a thin, squeaking voice, from a personage almost hidden behind a copious supper of broken meat and pastry.  But whether the party thus addressed was too much alarmed to let the current of his spirit run bubbling from the spring of either mirth or minstrelsy, or he was too deeply buried in his own thoughts, it were needless to inquire.  The request for a while passed by unheeded.

Gaffer Gee was the ballad-monger of the whole district.  He kept on a comfortable and vagabond sort of existence, by visiting the different mansions where good cheer was to be had, and where he was generally a welcome guest, both in bower and hall.  His legendary lore seemed inexhaustible; and, indeed, his memory was like an old chest full of scraps continually rummaged.  He knew all the scandal and family secrets throughout the parish, and had a quick eye at detecting either a love affair or a feud.  He composed a number of the wild ballads that he sang or recited, or at least put them into that jingling and quaint rhythm, acquired by habitual intercourse with the phraseology peculiar to these popular descants.  On hearing a story he could readily shape it into verse, extempore, too, upon occasion; and many were the jokes that rebounded from his theme, whether in hall or kitchen.  It was pleasant to watch his little grey eye, and the twinkling lashes, as they rose and fell, varying the expression of his lips.  A slight lisp gave an air of simplicity to his ditties, which never failed to charm his auditors.  He could throw the simplest