ed,"
answered Mrs. Fry almost forgetting her manners in her excitement, "but
what took mun down among the boys? Why, to take the ale from them!
And what is ales but sarpints, my Lady?" said Mrs. Fry throwing out her
hands, "and what makes the man so friendly with sarpints, that he must
come to save mun? _We_ know, do you and I, my Lady, who is the old
sarpint and the father of sarpints. And then what was he doing with
that strange baste on his shoulder, my Lady?"

"Why, it was only a tame squirrel," said Lady Eleanor.

"Squirrel, my lady," said Mrs. Fry mysteriously. "Aye, 'twas a
squirrel; but who knows but what it mayn't be a dragin when it gets
'oom?"

"A squirrel turn into a dragon?" said Lady Eleanor. "I never heard
such childish stuff in my life; and I wouldn't have believed that a
sensible woman like you could have thought of such a thing."

"Well, I won't say as it _was_ a dragin, my Lady," said Mrs. Fry, a
little abashed, "but they do say that the witch has to do with dragins.
She comes from out over the moor some place, she doth; and though she's
a seen on times about Cossacombe, no man can tell where she liveth nor
dare go sarch for mun. Jimmy Beer went out to look for mun two year
agone in the dimmet after Cossacombe revel, but the fog came down so
thick as a bag; and while he was a-wandering, a dragin (for so he saith
it was, though I never seed a dragin myself) passed so close to mun as
I be to you, my Lady, and when he looked to the ground he saw the mark
of his cloven hoof so plain as could be. And he was pixy-led all that
night, my Lady, was the old Jimmy, and when he come home all his money
was gone; so I reckon that the pixies is in league with the witches."

"I suspect that Jimmy had drunk too much cider," said Lady Eleanor
severely; "he should have kept sober or stuck to the road, and then he
would not have brought back foolish stories about pixies and witches.
I wonder that you can believe in such things."

"I know mun too well, my Lady," said Mrs. Fry mournfully. "There was
my pig back in the spring, so rasonable a pig as ever ate mate, until
the white witch to Gratton overlooked mun. And I never did the white
witch no harm, nor the pig didn't neither; but as they was driving the
pig along the road--and you know what pigs is, driving, my Lady,--the
white witch comes riding on his one-eyed donkey; and the pig runned
against the donkey, and the old man[1] muttered something or 'nother