e attorney; but he was of an
enterprising turn, and he shifted the whole business, papers, cash, and
all to the Lowlands, to the no small inconvenience of his employer, who
hath never been able to lay hands either on one or the other from that
day to this. Septimus died young. As to Octavius, Will Spotterbridge
broke out early in him, and he was slain in a quarrel over some dice,
which were said by his enemies to be so weighted that the six must ever
come upwards. Let this moving recital be a warning to ye, if ye are
fools enough to saddle yourselves with a wife, to see that she hath
no vice in her, for a fair face is a sorry make-weight against a foul
mind.'

Reuben and I could not but laugh over this frank family confession,
which our companion delivered without a sign of shame or embarrassment.
'Ye have paid a heavy price for your father's want of discretion,' I
remarked. 'But what in the name of fate is this upon our left?'

'A gibbet, by the look of it,' said Saxon, peering across at the gaunt
framework of wood, which rose up from a little knoll. 'Let us ride past
it, for it is little out of our way. They are rare things in England,
though by my faith there were more gallows than milestones when Turenne
was in the Palatinate. What between the spies and traitors who were bred
by the war, the rascally Schwartzritter and Lanzknechte, the Bohemian
vagabonds, and an occasional countryman who was put out of the way lest
he do something amiss, there was never such a brave time for the crows.'

As we approached this lonely gibbet we saw that a dried-up wisp of a
thing which could hardly be recognised as having once been a human being
was dangling from the centre of it. This wretched relic of mortality
was secured to the cross-bar by an iron chain, and flapped drearily
backwards and forwards in the summer breeze. We had pulled up our
horses, and were gazing in silence at this sign-post of death, when what
had seemed to us to be a bundle of rags thrown down at the foot of the
gallows began suddenly to move, and turned towards us the wizened face
of an aged woman, so marked with evil passions and so malignant in its
expression that it inspired us with even more horror than the unclean
thing which dangled above her head.

'Gott in Himmel!' cried Saxon, 'it is ever thus! A gibbet draws witches
as a magnet draws needles. All the hexerei of the country side will sit
round one, like cats round a milk-pail. Beware of her! she ha