“’Tis too long to unfold now,” he said, “because Bill and me have got to be about our duty; but if you’ll drop in o’ Sunday and drink a dish of tea, Wade, you can hear the truth of the Hound; and you can look in on your way to work, Bill, and hear likewise if you’ve a mind to it.”

They promised to come and upon the appointed hour both turned up at the gamekeeper’s cottage on Thurlow Down, where the woods end and the right of way gives to the high road.  And there was John and his wife, Milly, and their daughter, Millicent, for she was called after her mother and always went by her full name to distinguish her.  Meadows had married late in life and Milly was forty when he took her, and they never had but one child.  A very lovely, shy, woodland sort of creature was Millicent Meadows, and though a good few had courted her, William Parsloe among ’em, none had won her, or tempted her far from her mother’s apron-strings as yet.  Dark and brown-eyed and lively she was, with a power of dreaming, and she neighboured kindlier among wild things than tame, and belonged to the woods you might say.  She was a nervous maiden, however, and owing to her gift of make-believe, would people the forest with strange shadows bred of her own thoughts and fancies.  So she better liked the sunshine than the moonlight and didn’t travel abroad much after dark unless her father, or some other male, was along with her.

Another joined the tea-party—­a very ancient man, once a woodman, and a crony of John’s; and the keeper explained to the younger chaps why he’d asked Silas Belchamber to come to tea and meet ’em.

“Mr. Belchamber’s the oldest servant on the property and a storehouse of fine tales, and when I told him the Hound had been seen, he was very wishful to see the man as had done so,” explained Mr. Meadows.  “You may say the smell of a saw-pit clings to Silas yet, for he moved and breathed in the dust of pine and larch for more’n half a century.”

“And now I be waiting for the grey woodman to throw me myself,” said Mr. Belchamber.  “But I raised up as well as threw down, didn’t I, John?”

“Thousands o’ dozens of saplings with those hands you planted, and saw lift up to be trees,” answered Meadows, “and scores of dozens of timber you’ve felled; and now, if you’ve took your tea, Silas, I’d have you tell these chaps the story of Weaver Knowles, because you’ll do it better than what I can.”

The old man sparked up a bit.

“For my part, knowing all I know, I never feared the Hound’s Pool,” he said, “though a wisht place in the dimpsey and after dark as we know.  But when a lad I drew many a sizeable trout out of it—­afore your time, John, when it weren’t poaching to fish there as it be now.  Not that I ever see the Hound; but I’ve known them that have, and if I don’t grasp the truth of the tale, who should, for my grandfather acksually knowed the son of old Weaver Knowles, and he heard it from the man’s own lips, and I heard it from grandfather when he was eighty-nine year old and I was ten.”