mother's room. Nobody was there, but there was
litter; there were scattered goose feathers,
there was the other claw. Familiar with the
course of household talk, she understood the
situation, and coming back to Martin, who still
stood in the room, holding the claw out at
arm's length, said, "This is very wonderful.
My father is not astir. But can you go home
and go to bed, Martin, with that claw in your
house? Might not the owner miss it, look for
it, and come and fetch it?"

Martin dropped the goose-foot, and asked,
trembling, for more brandy.

"This little glass," said Greta; "then go
home. We have no fear, you know, at The
Heart's Content. Leave claw here to-night."

"Well, yes," said Martin, "because
Christopher could see it in the morning. The
creature smelt so that he turned my stomach, and I
fear I shall lie late to-morrow. But this bit of
candle has been blessed by the priest. It will
burn three hours yet, and by then it will be nearly
dawn. See, I put the claw here and the blessed
candle by the side of it. You have nothing to
fear. Good night! How soundly Christopher
sleeps. One doesn't hear so much as a snore in the
house. See now, the moon is up. Good night!"

Night had for Greta no more terrors than day.
With a clear sky and a full moon, there were no
dangers for her or hers upon the Death's Head
Mountain; so she quietly put out her own light
and the holy candle, and sat by the window,
alone in the house, thinking of Ishmael, and
looking out upon the moonlit road.

Two hours after midnight she saw two
grotesque figures approaching, one of them loaded
with a heavy sack. That was her father, who
had really discovered Kerli's hoard of gold in
the innermost throat of the Death's Head
Cavern, under Kerli's Peak. Without taking
out one gold piece, Christopher buried the
treasure-bag under his hearth-stone. At dawn the
household fires were lighted; the goose-claw
was burnt, and there was a bonfire of goose
feathers made on the brick floor of the inn
parlour that caused it to smell horribly all day.
Martin, eager to tell his story, was the first
guest of the day at The Heart's Content, and
being much sickened by the smell of the burnt
feathers, and edified by the fact that his claw
had disappeared in flames of fire, declared that
he recognised distinctly the smell that had
distressed him overnight. Every man then came from
the village to turn his stomach, and drink brandy,
and discuss for the next two months the remarkably
tenacious and overpowering smell of the
foul creature that Doctor Martin overcame. That
was because the wicked landlady found for a
while more profit in the feathers than in the
flesh of her geese. By burning a few dozen of
them whenever the inn parlour was empty she
could fill it again with the gossips of the six
adjoining parishes.

But, during the next twelve months, where was
Ishmael? He had hurried in pursuit of the
storm down and down over the face of sharp
crag and loose stone, through bramble, and by
tufts of grass that held only for half a minute
the weight of the climber, forced to hang from
them. He leapt down the water-course, and
reaching a turn in the valley, heard the thunder
of the storm-cloud as it rolled in a thick, black
mist, lower yet towards a huge rift in a mountain
base, and there seemed to have been swallowed
down into the bowels of the earth. Ishmael had
heard talk, in the inn parlour, of a wide and
fearful gulf in the next valley, to the bottom of
which no stone was ever heard to fall. The
smooth and herbless walls of rock on either side,
that sank, as it seemed, into the very bowels of
the earth, were commonly known in those
valleys as the Dumps, and, from far down in the
Dumps, men said that they had heard wild cries
and howlings, that reached even to the very
mountain top. Beyond the inn parlour and the
village market, Ishmael had never travelled
since he lived with Kerli at the Peak. But
this, surely, must be the gulf of which so many
a wild tale was told; this, into which the stormcloud,
and with it, he believed, the giant of the
mountain who held Kerli in his clutch, had
swept. "I will go down singing," said the
youth to himself. " A cheerful song may scare
the gloom demon, if it be really Glum himself
who has seized my dear master. He has often
said that while I left him alone by the Peak,
there were moments when the gloom fiend might
have power over him. He has often asked me
to scare with my songs that Giant Glum, and,
rather than all others, with the cheerful song
that ended ever at one place, broken with the
weeping of us both; the place where it was
broken, when——"

Ishmael was sobbing aloud at the mouth of
the cavern. In his boyhood there had been no
mother in his house. She was away, he knew
not why, and he worshipped her only as the
memory of a face that had been often eye to eye
with him when he was but a little child. One
day when he returned, as a lad, gaily singing to
his father's house, he saw from afar something
that lay still at its closed door.  As he sang on,
he saw one come and knock again and again, to
whom the door remained closed. Then the
man took that something up, and bore it
stretched upon his arms away from the house.
The lad was still in the midst of his carol when
he met the stranger with his burden. He was
a tottering black-bearded man, tenderly carrying
a white load that faintly stirred—a dying woman
with a beautiful dark face. Her eye turned
upon Ishmael as he sang, and the song stopped.
It was his mother. There was a quiver of pain
on her face. The man fell upon one knee and
fanned her with his hand, but she was dead.
Ishmael laid his hot wet cheek upon hers, but
the man did not part them. Presently he
stroked the boy's hair, and said in a faint voice,
"She was false to me, in years long gone; and
false to him. But it is I who love her—and
you. Be with me when I lay her in the tomb."
He saw his mother to the grave, and for that
act his father cursed him. Kerli, who once had
been his father's friend, spoke to the winds on