tragedies of
passion, with their gravity and poignancy, and of the mystery that
broods at the back of all our thoughts. But most of all he was aware
that the building standing fronting him was the very kernel of his
individuality projected into visibility: the one knot into which all his
memories were tied.

He would hold his children spell-bound by the hour as he told them the
ordinary folk-tales of the hamlet, with that ruin on the hillside as the
stage for the majority of them; till his daughter Ruth, who was young
and sentimental, though with a streak of passion running through her
nature, learned to contemplate the ruin with an awe akin to his, and
stared up wonderingly at it, so long and so often, that at last it had
become for her a necessary part of life.

While Ruth was still a child, the haunted ruin chiefly attracted her
thoughts as the scene and locality of uncanny occurrences that were
fanciful and unusual rather than sombre or suggestive. It was the great
haunted cheese in which the piskies burrowed, and out of which they
hopped with amusing unexpectedness: it was the building to pass which
you must always turn your stocking, if you wished to escape being
_pisky-ledden_, or misguided: it was the place to which the "Little
Folks"[P] conveyed stolen children: above all, it was the place of dark
and cobwebbed corners, where naughty children were put to live with
snails and spiders and with great big goggle-eyed buccaboos!

As she stood on her doorstep with her bit of knitting in her hand--a
tiny doll's stocking, or a garter for herself--little Ruth would stare
up at the great black building, with the scarlet splendour of the sunset
at its back, until she almost fancied she could see the little winking
piskies grinning through the window-holes and clambering across the
roofs.

And by-and-by, when the rich yellow sky began to darken and the flocks
of rooks flew cawing overhead, Ruth would shiver with a delicious sense
of security as she stood beneath the porch in the gathering twilight and
heard the wind begin to moan and sigh mysteriously, as if it trembled at
the thought of spending the night on the hillside with no other company
than that "whisht[Q] owld house."

As she grew older and became aware of the drift of her wishes, feeling
stirrings and promptings at the roots of her life, her imagination
seized now on the passionate human tragedies which, according to the
legends, had been enacted in the bui