t past week had come to him at last; their
friendship, their faith in an old god, and above all that sense of a
great adventure, for the spirit of which he had so diligently been
searching. "Up-along" life was an affair of measured rules and things
foreseen. "Down-along" it was a game of unending surprises and a
gossamer web shot with the golden light of romance. High-falutin
perhaps, but to Harry, as he sat before the fire with the strange dog
and those ten wild men, words and pictures came too speedily to admit
of a sense of the absurd.

An old man, with a long white beard and a shaking hand, knew strange
tales of the moor. When the mists creep up and blot out the land, then
the four grey stones take life and are the giants of old, and strange
sacrifices are grimly performed. Talse Carlyon had seen things late on
a moonlit night with the mists swimming white and silvery-grey over the
moor. He had lost his way and had met a man of mighty size who had led
him by the hand. There had been spirits about, and at the foot of the
grey stone a pool of blood--he had never been the same man since.

"There are spirits and spirits," said the old man solemnly, "and there
'm some good and some bad, for the proper edification of us mortals,
and, for my part, it's not for the like of us to meddle."

He stroked his beard--a very gloomy old man with a blind eye. Harry
remembered that he had had a wife twenty years before, so he inquired
about her.

"Dead," said the old man fiercely, "dead--and, thank God, she went out
like a candle."

He muttered this so fiercely that Harry said no more, and the white
beard shone in the light of the fire, and his blind eye opened and shut
like a box, and his wrinkled hand shook on his knee. The fishing had
been bad of late, and here again they spoke as if some personal power
had been at work. There were few there who had not lost some one
during the years that they had served her, and the memory of what this
had been and the foreshadowing of the dangerous future hung over them
in the room. Songs were sung, jokes were made, but they were the songs
and laughter of men on guard, with the enemy to be encountered,
perhaps, in the morning.

Harry sat in his corner of the great seat, watching the leaping of the
flames, his hand on Newsome's shoulder, listening to the murmuring
voices at his side. He scarcely knew whether he were awake or
sleeping; their laughter came to him dimly, and it see