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 that particular tree behind whose trunk stood Master Jeremy Sparrow.

“Oh, the bodkin through my tongue! Oh, the bodkin through my tongue!”

Two of the guard sat with hanging lip and lacklustre eyes, turned to stone; one, at full length upon the ground, bruised his face against the pine needles and called on the Virgin; the