from working his, the devil's, will, and
enabled them to keep alive the baby who would be a great wizard. He told
her moreover that midwife Megges was an angel (here the crowd laughed)
sent to kill the said infant, who really was his own child, as might be
seen by its black eyebrows and cleft tongue, also its webbed feet, and
that he would appear in the shape of the ghost of Sir John Foterell
to save it and give it to her, which he did, saying the Lord's Prayer
backwards, and that she must bring it up "in the faith of the Pentagon."

Thus the poor crazed thing raved on, while sentence by sentence a scribe
wrote down her gibberish, causing her at last to make her mark to it,
all of which took a very long time. At the end she begged that she might
be pardoned and not burnt, but this, she was informed, was impossible.
Thereon she became enraged and asked why then had she been led to tell
so many lies if after all she must burn, a question at which the crowd
roared with laughter. On hearing this the priest, who was about to
absolve her, changed his mind and ordered her to be fastened to her
stake, which was done by the blacksmith with the help of his apprentice
and his portable anvil.

Still, her "confession" was solemnly read over to Cicely and Emlyn, who
were asked whether, after hearing it, they still persisted in a denial
of their guilt. By way of answer Cicely lifted the hood from her boy's
face and showed that his eyebrows were not black, but light-coloured.
Also she bared his feet, passing her little finger between his toes, and
asking them if they were webbed. Some of them answered, "No," but a monk
roared, "What of that? Cannot Satan web and unweb?" Then he snatched the
infant from Cicely's arms and laid it down upon the stump of an oak that
had been placed there to receive it, crying out--

"Let this child live or die as God pleases."

Some brute who stood by aimed a blow at it with a stick, yelling, "Death
to the witch's brat!" but a big man, whom Emlyn recognized as one of old
Sir John's tenants, caught the falling stick from his hand and dealt him
such a clout with it that he fell like a stone, and went for the rest
of his life with but one eye and the nose flattened on the side of his
face. Thenceforward no one tried to harm the babe, who, as all know,
because of what befell him on this day, went in after life by the
nickname of Christopher Oak-stump.

The Abbot's men stepped forward to tie Cicely to her s