w she could not swim.
"Better a dry death than a wet one, it will save my clothes, anyway!"
So, letting go her hold of the creature's mane, she was about to let
herself slide down, when the wind caught her and carried her right off the
horse's back. They were going at a terrific rate, and the wind was very
keen on the moor; it lifted her right up in the air, high above the horse,
and then, just as she thought she was going to disappear through the
clouds, she was dropped plump into the rushes by the edge of the very pool
itself.

At the same moment the air became filled with the most awful clamour, such
yells and cries, and terrible laughter as no living being had ever heard
before. Poor old Joan thought her last hour had really come, and gave
herself up for lost, for when she looked round she saw the fearful great
creature she had been riding, disappearing in the distance in flames of
fire, and tearing after it, helter-skelter, pell-mell, was a horrible crew
of men and dogs and horses. Two or three hundred of them there must have
been, and not one of the lot had a head on his shoulders.

Joan would have screamed, too, if she had not been stricken dumb with
fright; so, very nearly scared to death, trembling with cold and fear,
there she lay until they had disappeared.

How she scrambled out of her soft, damp resting-place she could never
tell, but she did, somehow, and got as far as Trove Bottom, though without
any shoes, for they had come off in the ditch. Her shawl was gone, too,
and all her marketing, and, worst of all, her precious broad-brimmed
beaver hat.

There was a linhay down at the Bottom, where Squire Lovell kept a lot of
sheep, and into that Joan crept, and lay down, and from sheer exhaustion
fell asleep and slept till morning. How much longer she would have slept
no one knows, but on Sunday mornings it was the Squire's habit to go down
and look over his sheep, and on this Sunday, though it was Christmas Day,
he visited them as usual.

His entrance with his boys and his dogs and his flashing lantern woke old
Joan with a start, and so certain was she that they were the horse, and
the huntsmen, and their hounds come again, that she sprang up in a frenzy
of terror. "Get out, get out!" she cried, "let a poor old woman be!"
But instead of the hollow laugh of the huntsmen, it was the Squire's voice
that answered her.

"Why, here's our poor old lost Joan!" he cried, amazed, "and frightened
out of her