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 debasing superstition, that his person should be looked on with abhorrence, and even a touch from him be accounted an evil of no slight import.  His mother alone had the power of communicating with him, or of understanding his grimaces.

“Now what will you give me for the use of his pretty eyes this lucky night?  The Thane will have regard to his testimony, though all that have free use of the tongue he holds to be liars and dishonest.  Never lied this youth by sign or token!”

A buzz went through the company, and the dame and her boy again sat down to await the issue.  All eyes were directed towards them, timidly and by stealth, as the consultation grew louder and more continuous.