"

Mr. Fett ended amid impressive silence.

"I don't feel altogether so keen-set as I did five minutes back,"
muttered Billy Priske.

"For my part," said Mr. Fett, anointing the gridiron with a pat of
ship's butter, "I offer no remark upon it beyond the somewhat banal
one by which we have all been anticipated by Hamlet. 'There are more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio--'."

"Faith, and so there are," broke in Nat Fiennes, catching me on a
sudden by the arm. "Listen!"

High on the forest ridge, far and faint, yet clear over the
pine-tops, a voice was singing.

The voice was a girl's--a girl's, or else some spirit's; for it fell
to us out of the very dawn, pausing and anon dropping again in little
cadences, as though upon the waft of wing; and wafted with it, wave
upon wave, came also the morning scent of the _macchia_.

We could distinguish no words, intently though we listened, or no
more than one, which sounded like _Mortu, mortu, mortu_, many times
repeated in slow refrain before the voice lifted again to the air.
But the air itself was voluble between its cadences, and the voice,
though a woman's, seemed to challenge us on a high martial note, half
menacing, half triumphant.

Nat Fiennes had sprung to his feet, musket in hand, when another and
less romantic sound broke the silence of the near woods; and down
through a glade on the slope above us, where darkness and day yet
mingled in a bluish twilight under the close boughs, came scampering
back the hogs described to us by Mr. Fett. Apparently they had
recovered from their fright, for they came on at a shuffling gallop
through the churchyard gate, nor hesitated until well within the
enclosure. There, with much grunting, they drew to a standstill and
eyed us, backing a little, and sidling off by twos and threes among
the nettles under the wall.

"They are tame hogs run wild," said my father, after studying them
for a minute. "They have lost their masters, and evidently hope we
have succeeded to the care of their troughs."

He moistened a manchet of bread from his wine-flask and flung it
towards them. The hogs winced away with a squeal of alarm, then took
courage and rushed upon the morsel together. The most of them were
lean brutes, though here and there a fat sow ran with the herd, her
dugs almost brushing the ground. In colour all were reddish-brown,
and the chine of each arched itself like a bent bow. Five or six
carried formidable tusks.