dition to a
less storied piece of ground.

"Then they go away," continued Diccon in graveyard tones. "They all go
away together,--Sir Thomas and Captain Argall, Captain West, Lieutenant
George Percy and his cousin, my master, and Sir Thomas's men; they go
out of the wood as though it were accursed, though indeed it was not
half so gloomy then as it is now. The sun shone into it then, sometimes,
and the birds sang. You would n't think it from the looks of things now,
would you? As the dead man rotted in his grave, and the living man died
by inches above him, they say the wood grew darker, and darker, and
darker. How dark it's getting now, and cold,--cold as the dead!"

His auditors drew closer together, and shivered. Sparrow and I were so
near that we could see the hands of the ingenious story-teller, bound
behind his back, working as he talked. Now they strained this way, and
now that, at the piece of rope that bound them.

"That was ten years ago," he said, his voice becoming more and more
impressive. "Since that day nothing comes into this wood,--nothing
human, that is. Neither white man nor Indian comes, that's certain. Then
why are n't there chains around that tree, and why are there no bones
beneath it, on the ground there? Because, Jackies all, the man that did
that murder walks! It is not always deadly still here; sometimes there
's a clanking of chains! And a bodkin through the tongue can't keep the
dead from wailing! And the murdered man walks, too; in his shroud he
follows the other--Is n't that something white in the distance yonder?"

My lord's four knaves looked down the arcade of trees, and saw the
something white as plainly as if it had been verily there. Each moment
the wood grew darker,--a thing in nature, since the sun outside was
swiftly sinking to the horizon. But to those to whom that tale had been
told it was a darkening unearthly and portentous, bringing with it a
colder air and a deepened silence.

"Oh, Sir Thomas Dale, Sir Thomas Dale!"

The voice seemed to come from the distance, and bore in its dismal
cadence the melancholy of the damned. For a moment my heart stood still,
and the hair of my head commenced to rise; the next, I knew that Diccon
had found an ally, not in the dead, but in the living. The minister,
standing beside me, opened his mouth again, and again that dismal voice
rang through the wood, and again it seemed, by I know not what art, to
come from any spot rather than from