. I doubt if Riccabocca
could have got him out of his dilemma with the same ease as Frank had
done.

"Halt there, my men,--lads and lasses too,--there, halt a bit. Mrs.
Fairfield, do you hear?--halt. I think his reverence has given us a
capital sermon. Go up to the Great House all of you, and drink a glass
to his health. Frank, go with them, and tell Spruce to tap one of the
casks kept for the haymakers. Harry" (this in a whisper), "catch the
parson, and tell him to come to me instantly."

"My dear Hazeldean, what has happened? You are mad."

"Don't bother; do what I tell you."

"But where is the parson to find you?"

"Where? gadzooks, Mrs. H.,--at the stocks, to be sure!"

CHAPTER XI.

Dr. Riccabocca, awakened out of his revery by the sound of footsteps,
was still so little sensible of the indignity of his position, that he
enjoyed exceedingly, and with all the malice of his natural humour,
the astonishment and stupor manifested by Stirn, when that functionary
beheld the extraordinary substitute which fate and philosophy had found
for Lenny Fairfield. Instead of the weeping, crushed, broken-hearted
captive whom he had reluctantly come to deliver, he stared speechless
and aghast upon the grotesque but tranquil figure of the doctor enjoying
his pipe, and cooling himself under his umbrella, with a sangfroid
that was truly appalling and diabolical. Indeed, considering that Stirn
always suspected the Papisher of having had a hand in the whole of that
black and midnight business, in which the stocks had been broken, bunged
up, and consigned to perdition, and that the Papisher had the evil
reputation of dabbling in the Black Art, the hocus-pocus way in which
the Lenny he had incarcerated was transformed into the doctor he found,
conjoined with the peculiarly strange eldrich and Mephistophelean
physiognomy and person of Riccabocca, could not but strike a thrill of
superstitious dismay into the breast of the parochial tyrant; while
to his first confused and stammered exclamations and interrogatories,
Riccabocca replied with so tragic an air, such ominous shakes of the
head, such mysterious equivocating, long-worded sentences, that Stirn
every moment felt more and more convinced that the boy had sold himself
to the Powers of Darkness, and that he himself, prematurely and in the
flesh, stood face to face with the Arch-Enemy.

Mr. Stirn had not yet recovered his wonted intelligence, which, to do
him justice, was us