There is nothing surprising in that story, to my mind, but the reprobation with which Beckwith visits himself. What could he have done that he did not? How could he have refrained from doing what he did? Yet there are curious things about it, and one of those is the partiality of the manifestation. The fairy was visible to him, his child and his dogs but to no one else. So, in my own experience, had she been whom I saw in K—— Park, whom Harkness, my companion, did not see. My explanation of it does not carry me over all the difficulties. I say, or will repeat if I have said it before, that the fairy kind are really the spirit, essence, substance (what you will) of certain sensible things, such as trees, flowers, wind, water, hills, woods, marshes and the like, that their normal appearance to us is that of these natural phenomena; but that in certain states of mind, perhaps in certain conditions of body, there is a relation established by which we are able to see them on our own terms, as it were, or in our own idiom, and they also to treat with us to some extent, to a large extent, on the same plane or standing-ground. That there are limitations to this relationship is plain already; for instance, Beckwith was not able to get his fairy prisoner to speak, and I myself have never had speech with more than one in my life. But as to that I shall have a very curious case to report shortly, where a man taught his fairy-wife to speak.

The mentioning of that undoubted marriage brings me to the question of sex. There is, of course, not the slightest doubt about it. Mrs. Ventris was a fairy wife. Mrs. Ventris was a puzzle to me for a good many years—in fact until Despoina explained to me many things. For Mrs. Ventris had a permanent human shape, and spoke as freely as you or I. I thought at one time that she might be the offspring of a mixed marriage, like Elsie Marks (whose mother, by the way, was another case of the sort); but in fact Mrs. Ventris and Mrs. Marks were both fairy wives, and the wood-girl, Mabilla King, whose case I am going to deal with was another. But this particular relationship is one which my explanation of fairy apparitions does not really cover: for marriage implies a permanent accessibility (to put it so) of two normally inaccessible natures; and parentage implies very much more. That, indeed, implies what the Christians call Miracle; but it is quite beyond dispute. I have a great number of cases ready to my hand, and shall deal at large with all of them in the course of this essay, in which fairies have had intercourse with mortals. It is by no means the fact that the wife is always of the fairy-kind. My own experience at C—— shall prove that. But I must content myself with mentioning the well-known case of Mary Wellwood who was wife to a carpenter near Ashby de la Zouche, and was twice taken by a fairy and twice recovered. She had children in each of her states of being, and on one recorded occasion her two families met. It appears to be a law that the wife takes the nature of the husband, or as much of it as she can, and it is important to remark that in all cases the children are of the husband's nature, fairy or mortal as he may happen to be. "Nature," Despoina told me, "follows the male." So far as fairies are concerned it seems certain that union with mortals runs in families or clans, if one may so describe their curious relationships to each other. There were five sisters of the wood in one of the Western departments of France (Lot-et-Garonne, I think), who all married men: two of them married two brothers. Apart they led the decorous lives of the French middle class, but when they were together it was a sight to see! A curious one, and to us, with our strong associations of ideas, that tremendous hand which memory has upon our heart-strings, a poignant one. For they had lost their powers, but not their impulses. It was a case of si vieillesse pouvait. I suppose they may have appeared to some chance wayfarer, getting a glimpse of them at their gambols between the poplar stems of the road, or in the vistas of the hazel-brakes, as a company of sprightly matrons on a frolic. To the Greeks foolishness! And be sure that such an observer would shrug them out of mind. My own impression is that these ladies were perfectly happy, that they had nothing of that maggior' dolore which we mortals know, and for which our joys have so often to pay. Let us hope so at any rate, for about a fairy or a growing boy conscious of the prison-shades could Poe have spun his horrors.

"To the Greeks foolishness," I said in my haste; but in very truth it was far from being so. To the Greeks there was nothing extraordinary in the parentage of a river or the love of a God for a mortal. Nor should there be to a Christian who accepts the orthodox account of the foundation of his faith. So far as we know, the generative process of every created thing is the same; it is, therefore, an allowable inference that the same process obtains with the created things which are not sensible to ourselves. If flowers mate and beget as we do, why not winds and waters, why not gods and nymphs, fauns and fairies? It is the creative urgency that imports more than the creative matter. To my mind, magna componere parvis, it is my fixed belief that all created nature known to us is the issue of the mighty love of God for his first-made creature the Earth. I accept the Greek mythology as the nearest account of the truth we are likely to get. I have never had the least difficulty in accepting it; and all I have since found out of the relations of men with their fellow-creatures of other genera confirms me in the belief that the urgency is the paramount necessity.

If I am to deal with a case of a mixed marriage, where the wife was a fairy, the spirit of a tree, I shall ask leave to set down first a plain proposition, which is that all Natural Facts (as wind, hills, lakes, trees, animals, rain, rivers, flowers) have an underlying Idea or Soul whereby they really are what they appear, to which they owe the beauty, majesty, pity, terror, love, which they excite in us; and that this Idea, or Soul, having a real existence of its own in community with its companions of the same nature, can be discerned by mortal men in forms which best explain to human intelligence the passions which they excite in human breasts. This is how I explain the fact, for instance, that the austerity of a lonely rock at sea will take the form and semblance, and much more than that, assume the prerogatives of a brooding man, or that the swift freedom of a river will pass by, as in a flash, in the coursing limbs of a youth, or that at dusk, out of a reed-encircled mountain-tarn, silvery under the hush of the grey hour, there will rise, and gleam, and sink again, the pale face, the shoulders and breast of the Spirit of the Pool; that, finally, the grace of a tree, and its panic of fury when lashed by storm, very capable in either case of inspiring love or horror, will be revealed rarely in the form of a nymph. There may be a more rational explanation of these curious things, but I don't know of one:

Happy may one be in the fairies of our own country. Happy, even yet, are they who can find the Oreads of the hill, Dryads of the wood, nymphs of river, marsh, plough-land, pasture, and heath. Now, leaving to Greece the things that are Greek, here for an apologue follows a plain recital of facts within the knowledge of every man of the Cheviots.

I

There is in that country, not far from Otterburn—between Otterburn and the Scottish border—a remote hamlet consisting of a few white cottages, farm buildings and a shingle-spired church. It is called Dryhope, and lies in a close valley, which is watered by a beck or burn, known as the Dryhope Burn. It is deeply buried in the hills. Spurs of the Cheviots as these are, they rise to a considerable elevation, but are pasturable nearly to the top. There, however, where the heather begins, peat-hags and morasses make dangerous provision, from which the flocks are carefully guarded. It is the practice of the country for the shepherds to be within touch of them all night, lest some, feeding upward (as sheep always do) should reach the summits and be lost or mired inextricably. These upland stretches, consequently, are among the most desolate spots to be found in our islands. I have walked over them myself within recent years and met not a human soul, nor beast of man's taming. Ravens, curlews, peewits, a lagging fox or limping hare; such, with the unsensed Spirits of the Earth, will be your company. In particular I traversed (in 1902) the great upland called Limmer Fell, and saw the tarn—Silent Water—and the trees called The Seven Sisters. They are silver birches of remarkable size and beauty. One of them is fallen. Standing there, looking north-west, the Knapp may be seen easily, some five miles away; and the extent of the forest with which it is covered can be estimated. A great and solemn wood that is, which no borderer will ever enter if he can help it.

There was—and may be still—a family of shepherds living in Dryhope of the name of King. When these things occurred there were alive George King, a patriarch of seventy-five years, Miranda King, his daughter-in-law, widow of his son, who was supposed to be a middle-aged woman, and a young man, Andrew King, her only son. That was the family; and there was a girl, Bessie Prawle, daughter of a neighbour, very much in and out of the house, and held by common report to be betrothed to Andrew. She used to help the widow in domestic matters, see to the poultry, milk the cow, churn the butter, press the cheeses. The Kings were independent people, like the dalesmen of Cumberland, and stood, as the saying is, upon their own foot-soles. Old King had a tenant-right upon the fell, and owed no man anything.

There was said to be a mystery connected with Miranda the widow, who was a broad-browed, deep-breasted, handsome woman, very dark and silent. She was not a native of Redesdale, not known to be of Northumberland. Her husband, who had been a sailor, had brought her back with him one day, saying that she was his wife and her name Miranda. He had said no more about her, would say no more, and had been drowned at sea before his son was born. She, for her part, had been as uncommunicative as he. Such reticence breeds wonderment in the minds of such a people as they of Dryhope, and out of wonderment arise wonders. It was told that until Miranda King was brought in sea-birds had never been seen in Dryhopedale. It was said that they came on that very night when George King the younger came home, and she with him, carrying his bundle and her own. It was said that they had never since left the hamlet, and that when Miranda went out of doors, which was seldom, she was followed by clouds of them whichever way she turned. I have no means of testing the truth of these rumours, but, however it may be, no scandal was ever brought against her. She was respectable and respected. Old King, the grandfather, relied strongly upon her judgment. She brought up her son in decent living and the fear of God.

In the year when Andrew was nineteen he was a tall, handsome lad, and a shepherd, following the profession, as he was to inherit the estate, of his forebears. One April night in that year he and his grandfather, the pair of them with a collie, lay out on the fell-side together. Lambing is late in Redesdale, the spring comes late; April is often a month of snow.

They had a fire and their cloaks; the ground was dry, and they lay upon it under a clear sky strewn with stars. At midnight George King, the grandfather, was asleep, but Andrew was broad awake. He heard the flock (which he could not see) sweep by him like a storm, the bell-wether leading, and as they went up the hill the wind began to blow, a long, steady, following blast. The collie on his feet, ears set flat on his head, shuddering with excitement, whined for orders. Andrew, after waking with difficulty his grandfather, was told to go up and head them off. He sent the dog one way—off in a flash, he never returned that night—and himself went another. He was not seen again for two days. To be exact, he set out at midnight on Thursday the 12th April, and did not return to Dryhope until eleven o'clock of the morning of Saturday the 14th. The sheep, I may say here, came back by themselves on the 13th, the intervening day.

That night of the 12th April is still commemorated in Dryhope as one of unexampled spring storm, just as a certain October night of the next year stands yet as the standard of comparison for all equinoctial gales. The April storm, we hear, was very short and had several peculiar features. It arose out of a clear sky, blew up a snow-cloud which did no more than powder the hills, and then continued to blow furiously out of a clear sky. It was steady but inconceivably strong while it lasted; the force and pressure of the wind did not vary until just the end. It came from the south-east, which is the rainy quarter in Northumberland, but without rain. It blew hard from midnight, until three o'clock in the morning, and then, for half an hour, a hurricane. The valley and hamlet escaped as by a miracle. Mr. Robson, the vicar, awakened by it, heard the wind like thunder overhead and went out of doors to observe it. He went out into a still, mild air coming from the north-west, and still heard it roaring like a mad thing high above him. Its direction, as he judged by sound, was the precise contrary of the ground current. In the morning, wreckage of all kinds, branches of trees, roots, and whole clumps of heather strewn about the village and meadows, while showing that a furious battle had been fought out on the fells, confirmed this suspicion. A limb of a tree, draped in ivy, was recognised as part of an old favourite of his walks. The ash from which it had been torn stood to the south-east of the village. In the course of the day (the 13th) news was brought in that one of the Seven Sisters was fallen, and that a clean drive could be seen through the forest on the top of Knapp. Coupled with these dreadful testimonies you have the disappearance of Andrew King to help you form your vision of a village in consternation.

Hear now what befell young Andrew King when he swiftly climbed the fell, driven forward by the storm. The facts are that he was agog for adventure, since, all unknown to any but himself, he had ventured to the summits before, had stood by Silent Water, touched the Seven Sisters one by one, and had even entered the dreadful, haunted, forest of Knapp. He had had a fright, had been smitten by that sudden gripe of fear which palsies limbs and freezes blood, which the ancients called the Stroke of Pan, and we still call Panic after them. He had never forgotten what he had seen, though he had lost the edge of the fear he had. He was older now by some two years, and only waiting the opportunity for renewed experience. He hoped to have it—and he had it.

The streaming gale drove him forward as a ship at sea. He ran lightly, without fatigue or troubled breath. Dimly above him he presently saw the seven trees, dipping and louting to the weather; but as he neared them they had no meaning for him, did not, indeed, exist. For now he saw more than they, and otherwise than men see trees.

II

In a mild and steady light, which came from no illumination of moon or stars, but seemed to be interfused with the air, in the strong warm wind which wrapped the fell-top; upon a sward of bent-grass which ran toward the tarn and ended in swept reeds he saw six young women dancing in a ring. Not to any music that he could hear did they move, nor was the rhythm of their movement either ordered or wild. It was not formal dancing, and it was not at all a Bacchic rout: rather they flitted hither and thither on the turf, now touching hands, now straining heads to one another, crossing, meeting, parting, winding about and about with the purposeless and untirable frivolity of moths. They seemed neither happy nor unhappy, they made no sound; it looked to the lad as if they had been so drifting from the beginning, and would so drift to the end of things temporal. Their loose hair streamed out in the wind, their light gossamer gowns streamed the same way, whipped about their limbs as close as wet muslin. They were bare-footed, bare-armed, and bare-headed. They all had beauty, but it was not of earthly cast. He saw one with hair like pale silk, and one, ruddy and fierce in the face, with snaky black hair which, he thought, flew out beyond her for a full yard's measure. Another had hazel-brown hair and a sharp little peering face; another's was colour of ripe corn, and another's like a thunder-cloud, copper-tinged. About and about they went, skimming the tops of the grasses, and Andrew King, his heart hammering at his ribs, watched them at their play. So by chance one saw him, and screamed shrilly, and pointed at him.

Then they came about him like a swarm of bees, angry at first, humming a note like that of the telegraph wire on a mountain road, but, as he stood his ground, curiosity prevailed among them and they pried closely at him. They touched him, felt his arms, his knees, handled his clothing, peered into his eyes. All this he endured, though he was in a horrible fright. Then one, the black-haired girl with a bold, proud face, came and stood closely before him and looked him full into his eyes. He gave her look for look. She put a hand on each shoulder and kissed him. After that there was a tussle among them, for each must do what her sister had done. They took a kiss apiece, or maybe more; then, circling round him, they swept him forward on the wind, past Silent Water, over the Edge, out on the fells, on and on and on, and never stopped till they reached Knapp Forest, that dreadful place.

There in the hushed aisles and glades they played with this new-found creature, played with him, fought for him, and would have loved him if he had been minded for such adventuring. Two in particular he marked as desiring his closer company—the black-haired and bold was one, and the other was the sharp-faced and slim with eyes of a mouse and hazel-brown hair. He called her the laughing girl and thought her the kindest of them all. But they were all his friends at this time. Andrew King, like young Tamlane, might have sojourned with them for ever and a day, but for one thing. He saw by chance a seventh maiden—a white-faced, woe-begone, horror-struck Seventh Sister, blenched and frozen under a great beech. She may have been there throughout his commerce with the rest, or she may have been revealed to him in a flash then and there. So as it was he saw her suddenly, and thereafter saw no other at all. She held his eyes waking; he left his playmates and went to her where she crouched. He stooped and took her hand. It was as cold as a dead girl's and very heavy. Amid the screaming of the others, undeterred by their whirling and battling, he lifted up the frozen one. He lifted her bodily and carried her in his arms. They swept all about him like infuriated birds. The sound of their rage was like that of gulls about a fish in the tide-way; but they laid no hands on him, and said nothing that he could understand, and by this time his awe was gone, and his heart was on fire. Holding fast to what he had and wanted, he pushed out of Knapp Forest and took the lee-side of the Edge on his way to Dryhope. This must have been about the time of the gale at its worst. The Seventh Sister by Silent Water may have fallen at this time; for had not Andrew King the Seventh Sister in his arms?

Anxiety as to the fate of Andrew King was spread over the village and the greatest sympathy felt for the bereaved family. To have lost a flock of sheep, a dog, and an only child at one blow is a terrible misfortune. Old King, I am told, was prostrated, and the girl, Bessie Prawle, violent in her lamentations over her "lad." The only person unmoved was the youth's mother, Miranda King the widow. She, it seems, had no doubts of his safety, and declared that he "would come in his time, like his father before him"—a saying which, instead of comforting the mourners, appears to have exasperated them. Probably they did not at all understand it. Such consolations as Mr. Robson the minister had to offer she received respectfully, but without comment. All she had to say was that she could trust her son; and when he urged that she had better by far trust in God, her reply, finally and shortly, was that God was bound by His own laws and had not given us heads and hearts for nothing. I am free to admit that her theology upon this point seems to me remarkably sound.

In the course of the 13th, anxious day as it promised to be, old George King, returning from a fruitless quest over the fells, came upon his sheep within a few hundred yards of his own house, collected together in a flock and under the watch of his dog. They were, in fact, as nearly as possible where he had understood them to be before their stampede of the previous night. He was greatly heartened by the discovery, though unable to account for the facts of it. The dog was excessively tired, and ate greedily. Next morning, when the family and some neighbours were standing together on the fell-side looking up the valley where the Dryhope burn comes down from the hills, they saw two figures on the rough road which follows it. Mrs. King, the widow, I believe, had seen them first, but she had said nothing. It was Bessie Prawle who raised the first cry that "Andrew was coming, and his wife with him." All looked in the direction she showed them and recognised the young man. Behind him walked the figure of a woman. This is the accustomed manner of a man and wife to walk in that country. It is almost a proof of their relationship. Being satisfied of the identity of their child the whole party returned to the homestead to await him and what he was bringing with him. Speculation was rife and volubly expressed, especially by Bessie Prawle. Miranda King, however, was silent; but it was noticed that she kept her eyes fixed upon the woman behind her son, and that her lips moved as if she was muttering to herself.

The facts were as the expectations. Andrew King brought forward a young, timid and unknown girl as his wife. By that name he led her up to his grandfather, then to his mother; as such he explained her to his neighbours, including (though not by name) Bessie Prawle, who had undoubtedly hoped to occupy that position herself.

Old King, overcome with joy at seeing his boy alive and well, and dazed, probably, by events, put his hands upon the girl's head and blessed her after the patriarchal fashion there persisting. He seems to have taken canonical marriage for granted, though nobody else did, and though a moment's reflection, had he been capable of so much, would have shown him that that could not be. The neighbours were too well disposed to the family to raise any doubts or objections; Bessie Prawle was sullen and quiet; only Miranda King seems to have been equal to the occasion. She, as if in complete possession of facts which satisfied every question, received the girl as an equal. She did not kiss her or touch her, but looked deeply into her eyes for a long space of time, and took from her again an equally searching regard; then, turning to her father-in-law and the company at large, she said, "This is begun, and will be done. He is like his father before him." To that oracular utterance old King, catching probably but the last sentence, replied, "And he couldn't do better, my child." He meant no more than a testimony to his daughter-in-law. Mrs. King's observations, coupled with that, nevertheless, went far to give credit to the alleged marriage.

The girl, so far, had said nothing whatever, though she had been addressed with more than one rough but kindly compliment on her youth and good looks. And now Andrew King explained that she was dumb. Consternation took the strange form of jocular approval of his discretion in selecting a wife who could never nag him—but it was consternation none the less. The mystery was felt to be deeper; there was nothing for it now but to call in the aid of the parish priest—"the minister," as they called him—and this was done. By the time he had arrived, Miranda King had taken the girl into the cottage, and the young husband and his grandfather had got the neighbours to disperse. Bessie Prawle, breathing threatenings and slaughter, had withdrawn herself.

Mr. Robson, a quiet sensible man of nearer sixty than fifty years, sat in the cottage, hearing all that his parishioners could tell him and using his eyes. He saw the centre-piece of all surmise, a shrinking, pale slip of a girl, by the look of her not more than fifteen or sixteen years old. She was not emaciated by any means, seemed to be well nourished, and was quite as vigorous as any child of that age who could have been pitted against her. Her surroundings cowed her, he judged. To Dryhope she was a stranger, a foreigner; to her Dryhope and the Dryhopedale folk were perilous matter. Her general appearance was that of a child who had never had anything but ill-usage; she flinched at every sudden movement, and followed one about with her great unintelligent eyes, as if she was trying to comprehend what they showed her. Her features were regular and delicate; her brows broad and eyebrows finely arched, her chin full, her neck slim, her hands and feet narrow and full of what fanciers call "breed." Her hair was very long and fine, dark brown with gleams of gold; her eyes were large, grey in colour, but, as I have said, unintelligent, like an animal's, which to us always seem unintelligent. I should have mentioned, for Mr. Robson noticed it at once, that her hair was unconfined, and that, so far as he could make out, she wore but a single garment—a sleeveless frock, confined at the waist and reaching to her knees. It was of the colour of unbleached flax and of a coarse web. Her form showed through, and the faint flush of her skin. She was a finely made girl. Her legs and feet were bare. Immodest as such an appearance would have been in one of the village maids, he did not feel it to be so with her. Her look was so entirely foreign to his experience that there was no standard of comparison. Everything about her seemed to him to be quite what one would have expected, until one came, so to speak, in touch with her soul. That, if it lay behind her inscrutable, sightless and dumb eyes, betrayed her. There was no hint of it. Human in form, visibly and tangibly human, no soul sat in her great eyes that a man could discern. That, however, is not now the point. Rather it is that, to all appearance a modest and beautiful girl, she was remarkably undressed. It was inconceivable that a modest and beautiful girl could so present herself, and yet a modest and beautiful girl she was.

Mr. Robson put it to himself this way. There are birds—for instance, jays, kingfishers, goldfinches—which are, taken absolutely, extremely brilliant in colouring. Yet they do not jar, are not obtrusive. So it was with her. Her dress was, perhaps, taken absolutely, indecorous. Upon her it looked at once seemly and beautiful. Upon Bessie Prawle it would have been glaring; but one had to dissect it before one could discover any fault with it upon its wearer. She was very pale, even to the lips, which were full and parted, as if she must breathe through her mouth. He noticed immediately the shortness of her breath. It was very distressing, and after a little while induced the same thing in himself. And not in him only, but I can fancy that the whole group of them sitting round her where she was crouched against Miranda King's knees, were panting away like steam-engines before they had done with her. While Mr. Robson was there Miranda never took her arm off her shoulder for a moment; but the girl's eyes were always fixed upon Andrew, who called himself her husband, unless her apprehensions were directly called elsewhere. In that case she would look in the required direction for the fraction of a second, terrified and ready, as you may say, to die at a movement, and then, her fears at rest, back to her husband's face.

Mr. Robson's first business was to examine Andrew King, a perfectly honest, well-behaved lad, whom he had known from his cradle. He was candid—up to a point. He had found her on the top of Knapp Fell, he said; she had been with others, who ill-treated her. What others? Others of her sort. Fairies, he said, who lived up there. He pressed him about this. Fairies? Did he really believe in such beings? Like all country people he spoke about these things with the utmost difficulty, and when confronted by worldly wisdom, became dogged. He said how could he help it when here was one? Mr. Robson told him that he was begging the question, but he looked very blank. To the surprise of the minister, old King—old George King, the grandfather—had no objections to make to the suggestion of fairies on Knapp Fell. He could not say, there was no telling; Knapp was a known place; strange things were recorded of the forest. Miranda, his daughter-in-law, was always a self-contained woman, with an air about her of being forewarned. He instanced her, and the minister asked her several questions. Being pressed, she finally said, "Sir, my son is as likely right as wrong. We must all make up our own minds." There that matter had to be left.

Andrew said that he had followed the fairies from the tarn on Lammer Fell into Knapp Forest. They had run away from him, taking this girl of his, as he supposed, with them. He had followed them because he meant to have her. They knew that, so had run. Why did he want her? He said that he had seen her before. When? Oh, long ago—when he had been up there alone. He had seen her face among the trees for a moment. They had been hurting her; she looked at him, she was frightened, but couldn't cry out—only look and ask. He had never forgotten her; her looks had called him often, and he had kept his eyes wide open. Now, when he had found her again, he determined to have her. And at last, he said, he had got her. He had had to fight for her, for they had been about him like hell-cats and had jumped at him as if they would tear him to pieces, and screamed and hissed like cats. But when he had got her in his arms they had all screamed together, once—like a howling wind—and had flown away.

What next? Here he became obstinate, as if foreseeing what was to be. What next? He had married her. Married her! How could he marry a fairy on the top of Knapp Fell? Was there a church there, by chance? Had a licence been handy? "Let me see her lines, Andrew," Mr. Robson had said somewhat sternly in conclusion. His answer had been to lift up her left hand and show the thin third finger. It carried a ring, made of plaited rush. "I put that on her," he said, "and said all the words over her out of the book." "And you think you have married her, Andrew?" It was put to him ex cathedrÂ. He grew very red and was silent; presently he said, "Well, sir, I do think so. But she's not my wife yet, if that's what you mean." The good gentleman felt very much relieved. It was satisfactory to him that he could still trust his worthy young parishioner.

Entirely under the influence of Miranda King, he found the family unanimous for a real wedding. To that there were two objections to make. He could not put up the banns of a person without a name, and would not marry a person unbaptised. Now, to baptise an adult something more than sponsors are requisite; there must be voluntary assent to the doctrines of religion by the postulant. In this case, how to be obtained? He saw no way, since it was by no means plain to him that the girl could understand a word that was said. He left the family to talk it over among themselves, saying, as he went out of the door, that his confidence in their principles was so strong that he was sure they would sanction no step which would lead the two young people away from the church door.

In the morning Miranda King came to him with a report that matters had been arranged and only needed his sanction. "I can trust my son, and see him take her with a good conscience," she told him. "She's not one of his people, but she's one of mine; and what I have done she can do, and is willing to do."

The clergyman was puzzled. "What do you mean by that, Mrs. King?" he asked her. "What are your people? How do they differ from mine, or your husband's?"

She hesitated. "Well, sir, in this way. She hasn't got your tongue, nor my son's tongue."

"She has none at all," said the minister; but Miranda replied, "She can talk without her tongue."

"Yes, my dear," he said, "but I cannot."

"But I can," was her answer; "she can talk to me—and will talk to you; but not yet. She's dumb for a season, she's struck so. My son will give her back her tongue—by-and-by."

He was much interested. He asked Miranda to tell him who had struck her dumb. For a long time she would not answer. "We don't name him—it's not lawful. He that has the power—the Master—I can go no nearer." He urged her to openness, got her at last to mention "The King of the Wood." The King of the Wood! There she stuck, and nothing he could say could move her from that name, The King of the Wood.

He left it so, knowing his people, and having other things to ask about. What tongue or speech had the respectable, the staid Miranda King in common with the scared waif? To that she answered that she could not tell him; but that it was certain they could understand each other. How? "By looks," she said, and added scornfully, "she's not the kind that has to clatter with her tongue to have speech with her kindred."

Miranda, then, was a kinswoman! He showed his incredulity, and the woman flushed. "See here, Mr. Robson," she said, "I am of the sea, and she of the fell, but we are the same nation. We are not of yours, but you can make us so. Directly I saw her I knew what she was; and so did she know me. How? By the eyes and understanding. I felt who she was. As she is now so was I once. As I am now so will she be. I'll answer for her; I'm here to do it. When once I'd followed my man I never looked back; no more will she. The woman obeys the man—that's the law. If a girl of your people was taken with a man of mine she'd lose her speech and forsake her home and ways. That's the law all the world over. God Almighty's self, if He were a woman, would do the same. He couldn't help it. The law is His; but He made it so sure that not Himself could break it."

"What law do you mean?" she was asked. She said, "The law of life. The woman follows the man."

This proposition he was not prepared to deny, and the end of it was that Mr. Robson baptised the girl, taking Miranda for godmother. Mabilla they called her by her sponsor's desire, "Mabilla By-the-Wood," and as such she was published and married. You may be disposed to blame him for lightness of conscience, but I take leave to tell you that he had had the cure of souls in Dryhope for five-and-thirty years. He claimed on that score to know his people. The more he knew of them, the less he was able to question the lore of such an one as Miranda King. And he might remind you that Mabilla King is alive to this hour, a wife and mother of children. That is a fact, and it is also a fact, as I am about to tell you, that she had a hard fight to win such peace.

Married, made a woman, she lost her haunted look and gained some colour in her cheeks. She lost her mortal chill. Her clothing, the putting up of her hair made some difference, but loving entreaty all the difference in the world. To a casual glance there was nothing but refinement to distinguish her from her neighbours, to a closer one there was more than that. Her eyes, they said, had the far, intent, rapt gaze of a wild animal. They seemed to search minutely, reaching beyond our power of vision, to find there things beyond our human ken. But whereas the things which she looked at, invisible to us, caused her no dismay, those within our range, the most ordinary and commonplace, filled her with alarm. Her eyes, you may say, communed with the unseen, and her soul followed their direction and dwelt remote from her body. She was easily startled, not only by what she saw but by what she heard. Nobody was ever more sensitive to sound. They say that a piano-tuner goes not by sound, but by the vibrations of the wire, which he is able to test without counting. It was so with her. She seemed to feel the trembling of the circumambient air, and to know by its greater or less intensity that something—and very often what thing in particular—was affecting it. All her senses were preternaturally acute—she could see incredible distances, hear, smell, in a way that only wild nature can. Added to these, she had another sense, whereby she could see what was hidden from us and understand what we could not even perceive. One could guess as much, on occasions, by the absorbed intensity of her gaze. But when she was with her husband (which was whenever he would allow it) she had no eyes, ears, senses or thoughts for any other living thing, seen or unseen. She followed him about like a dog, and when that might not be her eyes followed him. Sometimes, when he was afield with his sheep, they saw her come out of the cottage and slink up the hedgerow to the fell's foot. She would climb the brae, search him out, and then crouch down and sit watching him, never taking her eyes off him. When he was at home her favourite place was at his feet. She would sit huddled there for hours, and his hand would fall upon her hair or rest on her shoulder; and you could see the pleasure thrilling her, raying out from her—just as you can see, as well as hear, a cat purring by the fire. He used to whisper in her ear as if she was a child: like a child she used to listen and wonder. Whether she understood him or no it was sometimes the only way of soothing her. Her trembling stopped at the sound of his voice, and her eyes left off staring and showed the glow of peace. For whole long evenings they sat close together, his hand upon her hair and his low voice murmuring in her ear.

This much the neighbours report and the clergyman confirms, as also that all went well with the young couple for the better part of two years. The girl grew swiftly towards womanhood, became sleek and well-liking; had a glow and a promise of ripeness which bid fair to be redeemed. A few omens, however, remained, disquieting when those who loved her thought of them. One was that she got no human speech, though she understood everything that was said to her; another that she showed no signs of motherhood; a third that Bessie Prawle could not abide her. She alone of all the little community avoided the King household, and scowled whensoever she happened to cross the path of this gentle outland girl. Jealousy was presumed the cause; but I think there was more in it than that. I think that Bessie Prawle believed her to be a witch.

III

To eyes prepared for coming disaster things small in themselves loom out of a clear sky portentous. Such eyes had not young Andrew King the bride-groom, a youth made man by love, secure in his treasure and confident in his power of keeping what his confidence had won. Such eyes may or may not have had Mabilla, though hers seemed to be centred in her husband, where he was or where he might be. George King was old and looked on nothing but his sheep, or the weather as it might affect his sheep. Miranda King, the self-contained, stoic woman, had schooled her eyes to see her common duties. Whatever else she may have seen she kept within the door of her shut lips. She may have known what was coming, she must have known that whatever came had to come. Bessie Prawle, however, with hatred, bitter fear and jealousy to sharpen her, saw much.

Bessie Prawle was a handsome, red-haired girl, deep in the breast, full-eyed and of great colour. Her strength was remarkable. She could lift a heifer into a cart, and had once, being dared to it, carried Andrew King up the brae in her arms. The young man, she supposed, owed her a grudge for that; she believed herself unforgiven, and saw in this sudden marriage of his a long-meditated act of revenge. By that in her eyes (and as she thought, in the eyes of all Dryhope) he had ill-requited her, put her to unthinkable shame. She saw herself with her favours of person and power passed over for a nameless, haunted, dumb thing, a stray from some other world into a world of men, women, and the children they rear to follow them. She scorned Mabilla for flinching so much, she scorned her for not flinching more. That Mabilla could be desirable to Andrew King made her scoff; that Andrew King should not know her dangerous kept her awake at night.

For the world seemed to her a fearful place since Mabilla had been brought into it. There were signs everywhere. That summer it thundered out of a clear sky. Once in the early morning she had seen a bright light above the sun—a mock sun which shone more fiercely than a fire in daylight. She heard wild voices singing; on still days she saw the trees in Knapp Forest bent to a furious wind. When Mabilla crept up the fell on noiseless feet to spy for Andrew King, Bessie Prawle heard the bents hiss and crackle under her, as if she set them afire.

Next summer, too, there were portents. There was a great drought, so great that Dryhope burn ran dry, and water had to be fetched from a distance for the sheep. There were heather fires in many places; smut got into the oats, and a plague of caterpillars attacked the trees so that in July they were leafless, and there was no shade. There was no pasture for the kine, which grew lean and languid. Their bones stuck out through their skin; they moaned as they lay on the parched earth, and had not strength enough to swish at the clouds of flies. They had sores upon them, which festered and spread. If Mabilla, the nameless wife, was not responsible for this, who could be? Perhaps Heaven was offended with Dryhope on account of Andrew King's impiety. Bessie believed that Mabilla was a witch.

She followed the girl about, spying on everything she did. Once, at least, she came upon her lying in the heather. She was plaiting rushes together into a belt, and Bessie thought she was weaving a spell and sprang upon her. The girl cowered, very white, and Bessie Prawle, her heart on fire, gave tongue to all her bitter thoughts. The witch-wife, fairy-wife, child or whatever she was seemed to wither as a flower in a hot wind. Bessie Prawle towered above her in her strength, and gained invective with every fierce breath she took. Her blue eyes burned, her bosom heaved like the sea; her arm bared to the shoulder could have struck a man down. Yet in the midst of her frenzied speech, in full flow, she faltered. Her fists unclenched themselves, her arm dropped nerveless, her eyes sought the ground. Andrew King, pale with rage, sterner than she had ever seen him, stood before her.

He looked at her with deadly calm.

"Be out of this," he said; "you degrade yourself. Never let me see you again." Before she had shrunk away he had stooped to the huddled creature at his feet, had covered her with his arms and was whispering urgent comfort in her ear, caressing her with voice and hands. Bessie Prawle could not show herself to the neighbours for the rest of the summer and early autumn. She became a solitary; the neighbours said that she was in a decline.

The drought, with all the troubles it entailed of plague, pestilence and famine, continued through August and September. It did not really break till All-Hallow's, and then, indeed, it did.

The day had been overcast, with a sky of a coppery tinge, and intensely dry heat; a chance puff of wind smote one in the face, hot as the breath of a man in fever. The sheep panted on the ground, their dry tongues far out of their mouths; the beasts lay as if dead, and flies settled upon them in clouds. All the land was of one glaring brown, where the bents were dry straw, and the heather first burnt and then bleached pallid by the sun. The distance was blurred in a reddish lurid haze; Knapp Fell and its forest were hidden.

Mabilla, the dumb girl, had been restless all day, following Andrew about like a shadow. The heat had made him irritable; more than once he had told her to go home and she had obeyed him for the time, but had always come back. Her looks roamed wide; she seemed always listening; sometimes it was clear that she heard something—for she panted and moved her lips. There was deep trouble in her eyes too; she seemed full of fear. At almost any other time her husband would have noticed it and comforted her. But his nerves, fretted by the long scorching summer, were on this day of fire stretched to the cracking point. He saw nothing, and felt nothing, but his own discomfort.

Out on the parched fell-side Bessie Prawle sat like a bird of omen and gloomed at the wrath to come.

Toward dusk a wind came moaning down the valley, raising little spires of dust. It came now down, now up. Sometimes two currents met each other and made momentary riot. But farm-work has to get itself done through fair or foul. It grew dark, the sheep were folded and fed, the cattle were got in, and the family sat together in the kitchen, silent, preoccupied, the men oppressed and anxious over they knew not what. As for those two aliens, Miranda King and Mabilla By-the-Wood, whatever they knew, one of them made no sign at all, and the other, though she was white, though she shivered and peered about, had no means of voicing her thought.

They had their tea and settled to their evening tasks. The old shepherd dozed over his pipe, Miranda knitted fast, Mabilla stared out of the window into the dark, twisting her hands, and Andrew, with one of his hands upon her shoulder, patted her gently, as if to soothe her. She gave him a grateful look more than once, but did not cease to shiver. Nobody spoke, and suddenly in the silence Mabilla gasped and began to tremble. Then the dog growled under the table. All looked up and about them.

A scattering, pattering sound lashed at the window. Andrew then started up. "Rain!" he said; "that's what we're waiting for," and made to go to the door. Miranda his mother, and Mabilla his young wife, caught him by the frock and held him back. The dog, staring into the window-pane, bristling and glaring, continued to growl. They waited in silence, but with beating hearts.

A loud knock sounded suddenly on the door—a dull, heavy blow, as if one had pounded it with a tree-stump. The dog burst into a panic of barking, flew to the door and sniffed at the threshold. He whined and scratched frantically with his forepaws. The wind began to blow, coming quite suddenly down, solid upon the wall of the house, shaking it upon its foundations. George King was now upon his feet. "Good God Almighty!" he said, "this is the end of the world!"

The blast was not long-lived. It fell to a murmur. Andrew King, now at the window, could see nothing of the rain. There were no drops upon the glass, nor sound upon the sycamores outside. But even while he looked, and his grandfather, all his senses alert, waited for what was to come, and the two pale women clung together, knowing what was to come, there grew gradually another sound which, because it was familiar, brought their terrors sharply to a point.

It was the sound of sheep in a flock running. It came from afar and grew in volume and distinctness; the innumerable small thudding of sharp hoofs, the rustling of woolly bodies, the volleying of short breath, and that indefinable sense of bustle which massed things produce, passing swiftly.

The sheep came on, panic-driven, voiceless in their fear, but speaking aloud in the wildly clanging bells; they swept by the door of the house with a sound like the rush of water; they disappeared in that flash of sound. Old King cried, "Man, 'tis the sheep!" and flew for his staff and shoes. Miranda followed to fetch them; but Andrew went to the door as he was, shaking off his clinging wife, unlatched it and let in a gale of wind. The dog shot out like a flame of fire and was gone.

It was as if the wind which was driving the sheep was going to scour the house. It came madly, with indescribable force; it rushed into the house, blew the window-curtains toward the middle of the room, drove the fire outward and set the ashes whirling like snow all about. Andrew King staggered before it a moment, then put his head down and beat his way out. Mabilla shuddering shrank backward to the fireplace and crouched there, waiting. Old King came out booted and cloaked, his staff in his hand, battled to the door and was swept up the brae upon the gale. Miranda did not appear; so Mabilla, white and rigid, was alone in the whirling room.

Creeping to her through the open door, holding to whatever solid thing she could come by, entered Bessie Prawle. In all that turmoil and chill terror she alone was hot. Her grudge was burning in her. She could have killed Mabilla with her eyes.

But she did not, for Mabilla was in the hands of greater and stronger powers. Before Bessie Prawle's shocked eyes she was seen rigid and awake. She was seen to cower as to some threatening shape, then to stiffen, to mutter with her dry lips, and to grow still, to stare with her wide eyes, and then to see nothing. A glaze swam over her eyes; they were open, but as the eyes of the dead.

Bessie Prawle, horror-struck, stretched out her arms to give her shelter. All her honest humanity was reborn in her in this dreadful hour. "My poor lass, I'll not harm ye," she was saying; but Mabilla had begun to move. She moved as a sleep-walker, seeing but not seeing her way; she moved as one who must, not as one who would. She went slowly as if drawn to the open door. Bessie never tried to stop her; she could not though she would. Slowly as if drawn she went to the door, staring before her, pale as a cloth, rigid as a frozen thing. At the threshold she swayed for a moment in the power of the storm; then she was sucked out like a dried leaf and was no more seen. Overhead, all about the eaves of the house the great wind shrilled mockery and despairing mirth. The fire leapt toward the middle of the room and fell back so much white ash. Bessie Prawle plumped down to her knees, huddled, and prayed.

Andrew King, coming back, found her there at it, alone. His eyes swept the room. "Mabilla! Bessie Prawle, where is Mabilla?" The girl huddled and prayed on. He took her by the shoulder and shook her to and fro. "You foul wench, you piece, this is your doing." Bessie sobbed her denials, but he would not hear her. Snatching up a staff, he turned, threw her down in his fury. He left the house and followed the wind.

The wind caught him the moment he was outside, and swept him onward whether he would or not. He ran down the bank of the beck which seemed to be racing him for a prize, leaping and thundering level with its banks; before he had time to wonder whether the bridge still stood he was up with it, over it and on the edge of the brae. Up the moorland road he went, carried rather than running, and where it loses itself in the first enclosure, being hard up against the wall, over he vaulted, across the field and over the further wall. Out then upon the open fell, where the heather makes great cushions, and between all of them are bogs or stones, he was swept by the wind. It shrieked about him and carried him up and over as if he were a leaf of autumn. Beyond that was dangerous ground, but there was no stopping; he was caught in the flood of the gale. He knew very well, however, whither it was carrying him: to Knapp, that place of dread, whither he was now sure Mabilla had been carried, resumed by her own people. There was no drawing back, there was no time for prayer. All he could do was to keep his feet.

He was carried down the Dryhope fell, he said, into the next valley, swept somehow over the roaring beck in the bottom, and up the rugged side of Knapp, where the peat-hags are as high as rocks, and presently knew without the help of his eyes that he was nearing the forest. He heard the swishing of the trees, the cracking of the boughs, the sharp crack and crash which told of some limb torn off and sent to ruin; and he knew also by some hush not far off that the wind, great and furious as it was, was to be quieted within that awful place. It was so. He stood panting upon the edge of the wood, out of the wind, which roared away overhead. He twittered with his foolish lips, not knowing what on earth to do, nor daring to do anything had he known it; but all the prayers he had ever learned were driven clean out of his head.

He could dimly make out the tree-trunks immediately before him, low bushes, shelves of bracken-fern; he could pierce somewhat into the gloom beyond and see the solemn trees ranked in their order, and above them a great soft blackness rent here and there to show the sky. The volleying of the storm sounded like the sea heard afar off: it was so remote and steady a noise that lesser sounds were discernible—the rustlings, squeakings, and snappings of small creatures moving over small undergrowth. Every one of these sent his heart leaping to his mouth; but all his fears were to be swallowed up in amazement, for as he stood there distracted, without warning, without shock, there stood one by him, within touching distance, a child, as he judged it, with loose hair and bright eyes, prying into his face, smiling at him and inviting him to come on.

"Who in God's name—?" cried Andrew King; but the child plucked him by the coat and tried to draw him into the wood.

I understand that he did not hesitate. If he had forgotten his gods he had not forgotten his fairy-wife. I suppose, too, that he knew where to look for her; he may have supposed that she had been resumed into her first state. At any rate, he made his way into the forest by guess-work, aided by reminiscence. I believe he was accustomed to aver that he "knew where she was very well," and that he took a straight line to her. I have seen Knapp Forest and doubt it. He did, however, find himself in the dark spaces of the wood and there, sure enough, he did also see the women with whom his Mabilla had once been co-mate. They came about him, he said, like angry cats, hissing and shooting out their lips. They did not touch him; but if eyes and white hateful faces could have killed him, dead he had been then and there.

He called upon God and Christ and made a way through them. His senses had told him where Mabilla was. He found her pale and trembling in an aisle of the trees. She leaned against a tall tree, perfectly rigid, "as cold as a stone," staring across him with frozen eyes, her mouth open like a round O. He took her in his arms and holding her close turned and defied the "witches"—so he called them in his wrath. He dared them in the name of God to touch him or his wife, and as he did so he says that he felt the chill grow upon him. It took him, he said, in the legs and ran up his body. It stiffened his arms till they felt as if they must snap under the strain; it caught him in the neck and fixed it. He felt his eyes grow stiff and hard; he felt himself sway. "Then," he said, "the dark swam over me, the dark and the bitter cold, and I knew nothing more." Questioned as he was by Mr. Robson and his friends, he declared that it was at the name of God the cold got him first. He saw the women hushed and scared, and at the same time one of them looked over her shoulder, as if somebody was coming. Had he called in the King of the Wood? That is what he himself thought. It was the King of the Wood who had come in quest of Mabilla, had pulled her out of the cottage in Dryhope and frozen her in the forest. It was he, no doubt, said Andrew King, who had come to defy the Christian and his God. I detect here the inspiration of his mother Miranda, the strange sea-woman who knew Mabilla without mortal knowledge and spoke to her in no mortal speech. But the sequel to the tale is a strange one.

Andrew King awoke to find himself in Mabilla's arms, to hear for the first time in his life Mabilla call him softly by his name. "Andrew, my husband," she called him, and when he opened his eyes in wonder to hear her she said, "Andrew, take me home now. It is all over," or words to that effect. They went along the forest and up and down the fells together. The wind had dropped, the stars shone. And together they took up their life where they had dropped it, with one significant omission in its circumstance. Bessie Prawle had disappeared from Dryhope. She had followed him up the fell on the night of the storm, but she came not back. And they say that she never did. Nothing was found of her body, though search was made; but a comb she used to wear was picked up, they say, by the tarn on Limmer Fell, an imitation tortoise-shell comb which used to hold up her hair. Miranda King, who knew more than she would ever tell, had a shrewd suspicion of the truth of the case. But Andrew King knew nothing, and I daresay cared very little. He had his wood-wife, and she had her voice; and between them, I believe, they had a child within the year.

I ought to add that I have, with these eyes, seen Mabilla By-the-Wood who became Mabilla King. When I went from Dryhopedale to Knapp Forest she stood at the farmhouse door with a child in her arms. Two others were tumbling about in the croft. She was a pretty, serious girl—for she looked quite a girl—with a round face and large greyish-blue eyes. She had a pink cotton dress on, and a good figure beneath it. She was pale, but looked healthy and strong. Not a tall girl. I asked her the best way to Knapp Forest and she came out to the gate to point it to me. She talked simply, with a northern accent, and might have been the child of generations of borderers. She pointed me the very track by which Andrew King must have brought her home, by which the King of the Wood swept her out on the wings of his wrath; she named the tarn where once she dwelt as the spirit of a tree. All this without a flush, a tremor or a sign in her blue eyes that she had ever known the place. But these people are close, and seldom betray all that they know or think.