of a living creature near. And he began
with a sense of awe to recognise the place.

The tree against which he had been leaning
was one of the noble old beeches that
surround at irregular intervals the church-
yard of Shackleton, which spreads its green
and wavy lap on the edge of the Moor of
Catstean, at the opposite side of which
stands the rude cottage in which he had
just lost his consciousness. It was six
miles or more across the moor to his
habitation, and the black expanse lay before
him, disappearing dismally in the darkness.
So that, looking straight before him, sky
and land blended together in an
undistinguishable and awful blank.

There was a silence quite unnatural over
the place, The distant murmur of the
brook, which he knew so well, was dead;
not a whisper in the leaves above him; the
air, earth, everything about and above was
indescribably still; and he experienced that
quaking of the heart that seems to portend
the approach of something awful. He
would have set out upon his return across
the moor, had he not an undefined
presentiment that he was waylaid by
something he dared not pass.

The old grey church and tower of Shackleton
stood like a shadow in the rear. His
eye had grown accustomed to the obscurity,
and he could just trace its outline. There
were no comforting associations in his mind
connected with it; nothing but menace and
misgiving. His early training in his lawless
calling was connected with this very
spot. Here his father used to meet two
other poachers, and bring his son, then but
a boy, with him.

Under the church porch, towards morning,
they used to divide the game they had
taken, and take account of the sales they
had made on the previous day, and make
partition of the money, and drink their gin.
It was here he had taken his early lessons
in drinking, cursing, and lawlessness. His
father's grave was hardly eight steps from
the spot where he stood. In his present
state of awful dejection, no scene on
earth could have so helped to heighten his
fear.

There was one object close by which
added to his gloom. About a yard away,
in rear of the tree, behind himself, and
extending to his left, was an open grave,
the mould and rubbish piled on the other
side. At the head of this grave stood the
beech-tree: its columnar stem rose like a
huge monumental pillar. He knew every
line and crease on its smooth surface. The
initial letters of his own name, cut in its bark
long ago, had spread and wrinkled like the
grotesque capitals of a fanciful engraver,
and now with a sinister significance
overlooked the open grave, as if answering his
mental question, " Who for is t' grave
cut?"

He felt still a little stunned, and there
was a faint tremor in his joints that
disinclined him to exert himself; and, further,
he had a vague apprehension that take what
direction he might, there was danger around
him worse than that of staying where he
was.

On a sudden the stars began to blink
more fiercely, a faint wild light overspread
for a minute the bleak landscape, and he
saw approaching from the moor a figure
at a kind of swinging trot, with now and
then a zigzag hop or two, such as men
accustomed to cross such places make, to
avoid the patches of slob or quag that meet
them here and there. This figure
resembled his father's, and, like him, whistled
through his finger by way of signal as he
approached; but the whistle sounded not
now shrilly and sharp, as in old times,
but immensely far away, and seemed to sing
strangely through Tom's head. From habit
or from fear, in answer to the signal, Tom
whistled as he used to do five-and- twenty
years ago and more, although he was
already chilled with an unearthly fear.

Like his father, too, the figure held up
the bag that was in his left hand as he
drew near, when it was his custom to call
out to him what was in it. It did not
reassure the watcher, you may be certain,
when a shout unnaturally faint reached
him, as the phantom dangled the bag in
the air, and he heard with a faint distinctness
the words, "Tom Chuff's soul!"

Scarcely fifty yards away from the low
churchyard fence at which Tom was standing,
there was a wider chasm in the peat,
which there threw up a growth of reeds
and bulrushes, among which, as the old
poacher used to do on a sudden alarm, the
approaching figure suddenly cast itself
down.

From the same patch of tall reeds and
rushes emerged instantaneously what he
at first mistook for the same figure creeping
on all-fours, but what he soon perceived to
be an enormous black dog with a rough
coat like a bear's, which at first sniffed
about, and then started towards him in
what seemed to be a sportive amble,
bouncing this way and that, but as it drew
near it displayed a pair of fearful eyes that