row screaming around the
carcases added to the hideous effect of the scene. Nothing but the
living highwayman and his skeleton brethren was visible upon the
solitary spot. Around him was the lonesome waste of hill, o'erlooking
the moonlit valley: beneath his feet, a patch of bare and
lightning-blasted sod: above, the wan, declining moon and skies, flaked
with ghostly clouds; before him, the bleached bodies of the murderers,
for such they were.

"Will this be my lot, I marvel?" said Dick, looking upwards, with an
involuntary shudder.

"Ay, marry will it," rejoined a crouching figure, suddenly springing
from beside a tuft of briars that skirted the blasted ground.

Dick started in his saddle, while Bess reared and plunged at the sight
of this unexpected apparition.

"What, ho! thou devil's dam, Barbara, is it thou?" exclaimed Dick,
reassured upon discovering it was the gipsy queen, and no spectre whom
he beheld. "Stand still, Bess--stand, lass. What dost thou here, mother
of darkness? Art gathering mandrakes for thy poisonous messes, or
pilfering flesh from the dead? Meddle not with their bones, or I will
drive thee hence. What dost thou here, I say, old dam of the gibbet?"

"I came to die here," replied Barbara, in a feeble tone; and, throwing
back her hood, she displayed features well-nigh as ghastly as those of
the skeletons above her.

"Indeed," replied Dick. "You've made choice of a pleasant spot, it must
be owned. But you'll not die yet?"

"Do you know whose bodies these are?" asked Barbara, pointing upwards.

"Two of your race," replied Dick; "right brethren of the blade."

"Two of my sons," returned Barbara; "my twin children. I am come to lay
my bones beneath their bones--my sepulchre shall be their sepulchre; my
body shall feed the fowls of the air as theirs have fed them. And if
ghosts can walk, we'll scour this heath together. I tell you what, Dick
Turpin," said the hag, drawing as near to the highwayman as Bess would
permit her; "dead men walk and ride--ay, _ride_!--there's a comfort for
you. I've seen these do it. I have seen them fling off their chains, and
dance--ay, dance with me--with their mother. No revels like dead men's
revels, Dick. I shall soon join 'em."

"You will not lay violent hands upon yourself, mother?" said Dick, with
difficulty mastering his terror.

"No," replied Barbara, in an altered tone. "But I will let nature do her
task. Would she could do it more quickly. Such a life