Now nine is the crossest of all cross numbers, and full to the lip of all crochets.  So the wizard staggered back, and thought, and inquired again with bravery, “Where can you find a man and wife, one going up-hill and one going down, and not a word spoken between them?”

“In a cucumber plant,” said the modest saint; blushing even to think of it; and the wizard knew he was done for.

“You have tried me with ungodly questions,” continued the honest pilgrim, with one hand still over his eyes, as he thought of the feminine cucumber; “and now I will ask you a pure one.  To whom of mankind have you ever done good, since God saw fit to make you?”

The wizard thought, but could quote no one; and he looked at the saint, and the saint at him, and both their hearts were trembling.  “Can you mention only one?” asked the saint, pointing a piece of the true cross at him, hoping he might cling to it; “even a little child will do; try to think of some one.”

The earth was rocking beneath their feet, and the palace windows darkened on them, with a tint of blood, for now the saint was come inside, hoping to save the wizard.

“If I must tell the pure truth,” said the wizard, looking up at the arches of his windows, “I can tell of only one to whom I ever have done good.”

“One will do; one is quite enough; be quick before the ground opens.  The name of one—­and this cross will save you.  Lay your thumb on the end of it.”

“Nay, that I cannot do, great saint.  The devil have mercy upon me.”

All this while the palace was sinking, and blackness coming over them.

“Thou hast all but done for thyself,” said the saint, with a glory burning round his head; “by that last invocation.  Yet give us the name of the one, my friend, if one there be; it will save thee, with the cross upon thy breast.  All is crashing round us; dear brother, who is that one?”

“My own self,” cried the wretched wizard.

“Then there is no help for thee.”  And with that the honest saint went upward, and the wizard, and all his palace, and even the crag that bore it, sank to the bowels of the earth; and over them was nothing left except a black bog fringed with reed, of the tint of the wizard’s whiskers.  The saint, however, was all right, after sleeping off the excitement; and he founded a chapel, some three miles westward; and there he lies with his holy relic and thither in after ages came (as we all come home at last) both my Lorna’s Aunt Sabina, and her guardian Ensor Doone.

While yet I dwelled upon this strange story, wondering if it all were true, and why such things do not happen now, a man on horseback appeared as suddenly as if he had risen out of the earth, on the other side of the great black slough.  At first I was a little scared, my mind being in the tune for wonders; but presently the white hair, whiter from the blackness of the bog between us, showed me that it was Uncle Reuben come to look for me, that way.  Then I left my chair of rock, and waved my hat and shouted to him, and the sound of my voice among the crags and lonely corners frightened me.