en anywhere, with a round, brown-haired head and a
round snub nose, but also clad in clerical black, of a stricter cut. It
was only when I saw his broad curved hat lying on the table beside him
that I realized why I connected him with anything ancient. He was a
Roman Catholic priest.

Perhaps the third man, at the other end of the table, had really more
to do with it than the rest, though he was both slighter in physical
presence and more inconsiderate in his dress. His lank limbs were clad,
I might also say clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons;
he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more
saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and
neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair (which ought
to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which, in
conjunction with his yellow face, looked rather purple than red. The
unobtrusive yet unusual colour was all the more notable because his hair
was almost unnaturally healthy and curling, and he wore it full. But,
after all analysis, I incline to think that what gave me my first
old-fashioned impression was simply a set of tall, old-fashioned
wine-glasses, one or two lemons and two churchwarden pipes. And also,
perhaps, the old-world errand on which I had come.

Being a hardened reporter, and it being apparently a public inn, I did
not need to summon much of my impudence to sit down at the long
table and order some cider. The big man in black seemed very learned,
especially about local antiquities; the small man in black, though he
talked much less, surprised me with a yet wider culture. So we got on
very well together; but the third man, the old gentleman in the tight
pantaloons, seemed rather distant and haughty, until I slid into the
subject of the Duke of Exmoor and his ancestry.

I thought the subject seemed to embarrass the other two a little; but it
broke the spell of the third man's silence most successfully. Speaking
with restraint and with the accent of a highly educated gentleman, and
puffing at intervals at his long churchwarden pipe, he proceeded to tell
me some of the most horrible stories I have ever heard in my life:
how one of the Eyres in the former ages had hanged his own father; and
another had his wife scourged at the cart tail through the village; and
another had set fire to a church full of children, and so on.

Some of the tales, indeed, are not fit for public pri