“But what was that cry in the house?” I asked “And what became of the black woman?”

“The woman was never seen again in our quarter; and what the cry was my aunt never would say.  She seemed to know though; notwithstanding, as she said, that Captain and Mrs Crowfoot denied all knowledge of it.  But the lady looked dreadful, she said, and never was well again, and died at the birth of her first child.  That was the present Mrs Oldcastle’s father, sir.”

“But why should the woman have left you on the stair, instead of drowning you in the well at the bottom?”

“My aunt evidently thought there was some mystery about that as well as the other, for she had no doubt about the woman’s intention.  But all she would ever say concerning it was, ’The key was never found, Samuel.  You see I had to get a new one made.’  And she pointed to where it hung on the wall.  ‘But that doesn’t look new now,’ she would say.  ‘The lock was very hard to fit again.’  And so you see, sir, I was brought up as her nephew, though people were surprised, no doubt, that William Weir’s wife should have a child, and nobody know she was expecting.—­Well, with all the reports of the captain’s money, none of it showed in this old place, which from that day began, as it were, to crumble away.  There’s been little repair done upon it since then.  If it hadn’t been a well-built place to begin with, it wouldn’t be standing now, sir.  But it’s a very different place, I can tell you.  Why, all behind was a garden with terraces, and fruit trees, and gay flowers, to no end.  I remember it as well as yesterday; nay, a great deal better, for the matter of that.  For I don’t remember yesterday at all, sir.”

I have tried a little to tell the story as he told it.  But I am aware that I have succeeded very badly; for I am not like my friend in London, who, I verily believe, could give you an exact representation of any dialect he ever heard.  I wish I had been able to give a little more of the form of the old man’s speech; all I have been able to do is to show a difference from my own way of telling a story.  But in the main, I think, I have reported it correctly.  I believe if the old man was correct in representing his aunt’s account, the story is very little altered between us.

But why should I tell such a story at all?

I am willing to allow, at once, that I have very likely given it more room than it deserves in these poor Annals of mine; but the reason why I tell it at all is simply this, that, as it came from the old man’s lips, it interested me greatly.  It certainly did not produce the effect I had hoped to gain from an interview with him, namely, A Reduction to the common and present.  For all this ancient tale tended to keep up the sense of distance between my day’s experience at the Hall and the work I had to do amongst my cottagers and trades-people.  Indeed, it came very strangely upon that experience.