“Maybe,” Roger admitted.  “But if Mother Izan can’t keep her cow out of the bog I don’t see how she could pull down a stone wall.  It’s like the story of Dinas Emrys father told me,” he added with relish.  “King Vortigern was building a castle on Snowdon, and every night whatever they had built in the daytime fell down.  After awhile they sent for old Merlin to see what the matter was.  And it was two great serpents in a pool away down under the foundation.  One was white and one was red, and they fought all the time.  First the white one had the best of it, but the red one beat him at last, and chased him out of the pool.  Merlin told them that the red serpent meant the British and the white serpent the Saxons, and the British would drive the Saxons out.  But they haven’t done it yet.”

This was deliciously horrible.  “You don’t suppose there are snakes under our castle, do you, Roger?”

“Of course not,” said Roger, pulling in his lively pony.  “That was nothing but a tale.  I wish I could bore a hole into the cliff, and see.”

“Collet says Mother Izan is a witch,” said Eleanor, abandoning the subject of snakes.  “She hated it, when mother used some of her herb drinks last year.”

“I like Mother Izan,” said Roger sturdily.  “She cured my leg once, when a stone fell on it—­long before you came, when I was a little fellow.”  Roger was not quite ten.  “She knows more about plants and animals than anybody.  Ruric let her doctor his dog, the big one he calls Cuchullin.”

“Collet doesn’t like Ruric either,” said Eleanor.

“She doesn’t like anybody here really, except mother and me.  I never mind very much about what she says.  There’s Mother Izan in the doorway,—­and oh, what has she got hanging up in the big tree?”

The old woman was a queer bent creature with greenish eyes like a cat’s, and white unruly hair that would not stay under her coif.  In fact she looked not unlike a gaunt, grim old puss who had all her life fought what crossed her path, from snakes to staghounds.  She was so old that the village people could not remember when she had been young, and her grandsons were elderly men.

A wicker basket hung from the lowest branch of the poplar tree.  In it, cradled in close fine-woven osiers with a lining of rabbitskin, lay a solemn black-eyed baby, looking almost as old as the old woman herself.

“It’s like a changeling,” thought Eleanor, looking with fascinated eyes at the weird little being.  Lady Philippa smiled, and laid her hand softly on the furry black head.  “This is an unusual sight in your cottage,” she said.  “Whence came it, Goody?”

“Tis none of mine,” old Izan grumbled, “’tis the brat of a scatter-brained woman—­Kate, wife to Howel the mason.  She came screeching at me saying the babe was a changeling I had left in place of her child of two years, and I should care for it.  I have no mind for the tending of babes at my time of life, but I could not let the creature starve.  Natheless ’tis but ill fed, for my cow was lost in the marsh, and none will let me have milk for it.  Kate she’s dead of a fever, and Howel will have naught of the young one, so I have made shift as I could, with bread soaked in herb drink.”