must have
turned the corner of the Vicar's house at the moment when his eye was
wearied; for when he saw him for the first time he was advancing, in
the hazy moonlight, like the shadow of a cavalier, at a gallop, upon
the level strip of road that skirts the margin of the mere, between
the George and the Vicar's piers.

The hostler had not long to wonder why the rider pushed his beast at
so furious a pace, and how he came to have heard him, as he now
calculated, at least three miles away. A very few moments sufficed to
bring horse and rider to the inn door.

It was a powerful black horse, something like the great Irish hunter
that figured a hundred years ago, and would carry sixteen stone with
ease across country. It would have made a grand charger. Not a hair
turned. It snorted, it pawed, it arched its neck; then threw back its
ears and down its head, and looked ready to lash, and then to rear;
and seemed impatient to be off again, and incapable of standing quiet
for a moment.

The rider got down

As light as shadow falls.

But he was a tall, sinewy figure. He wore a cape or short mantle, a
cocked hat, and a pair of jack-boots, such as held their ground in
some primitive corners of England almost to the close of the last
century.

"Take him, lad," said he to old Scales. "You need not walk or wisp
him--he never sweats or tires. Give him his oats, and let him take his
own time to eat them. House!" cried the stranger--in the old-fashioned
form of summons which still lingered, at that time, in out-of-the-way
places--in a deep and piercing voice.

As Tom Scales led the horse away to the stables it turned its head
towards its master with a short, shill neigh.

"About _your_ business, old gentleman--we must not go too fast," the
stranger cried back again to his horse, with a laugh as harsh and
piercing; and he strode into the house.

The hostler led this horse into the inn yard. In passing, it sidled up
to the coach-house gate, within which lay the dead sexton--snorted,
pawed and lowered its head suddenly, with ear close to the plank, as
if listening for a sound from within; then uttered again the same
short, piercing neigh.

The hostler was chilled at this mysterious coquetry with the dead. He
liked the brute less and less every minute.

In the meantime, its master had proceeded.

"I'll go to the inn kitchen," he said, in his startling bass, to the
drawer who met him in the passage.

And on he went, as