inous house in an
England market town, I wondered, one with great eyes like to those of a
doe and a regal bearing?

No, that was nonsense. Potts had lived with shadows until he believed in
shadows that came out of his own imagination and into it returned again.
Still, she was a woman of some sort, and apparently she had a lover or
a husband, a man with a great fair beard. How at this date, which must
have been remote, did a golden-bearded man come to foregather with a
woman who wore such robes and ornaments as these? And that sword hilt,
worn smooth by handling and with an amber knob? Whence came it? To my
mind--this was before expert examination confirmed my view--it looked
very Norse. I had read the Sagas and I remembered a tale recovered in
them of some bold Norsemen who about the years eight or nine hundred
had wandered to the coast of what is known now to be America--I think a
certain Eric was their captain. Could the fair-haired man in the grave
have been one of these?

Thus I speculated before I looked at the pile of parchments so evidently
prepared from sheep skins by one who had only a very rudimentary
knowledge of how to work such stuff, not knowing that in those
parchments was hid the answer to many of my questions. To these I turned
last of all, for we all shrink from parchments; their contents are
generally so dull. There was a great bundle of them that had been lashed
together with a kind of straw rope, fine straw that reminded me of that
used to make Panama hats. But this had rotted underneath together with
all the bottom part of the parchments, many sheets of them, of which
only fragments remained, covered with dry mould and crumbling. Therefore
the rope was easy to remove and beneath it, holding the sheets in place,
was only some stout and comparatively modern string--it had a red thread
in it that marked it as navy cord of an old pattern.

I slipped these fastenings off and lifted a blank piece of skin set upon
the top. Beneath appeared the first sheet of parchment, closely, very
closely covered with small "black-letter" writing, so faint and faded
that even if I were able to read black-letter, which I cannot, of it
I could have made nothing at all. The thing was hopeless. Doubtless
in that writing lay the key to the mystery, but it could never be
deciphered by me or any one else. The lady with the eyes like a deer had
appeared to old Potts in vain; in vain had she bidden him to hand over
this manus