Yet One Of The Boys, The Younger, Had Been Wide Awake All The Time, Listening, Trembling With Terror, With Wide

Eyes to the dreadful tale, and only when they first became suspicious instinct came to his aid and closed his

Eyes and stilled his tremors and gave him the appearance of being asleep. Early next morning, with his terror still on him, he told what he had heard to his brother, and by and by, unable to keep the dreadful secret, they related it to someone - a carter or ploughman on the farm. He in turn told the farmer, who at once gave information, and in a short time the man and woman were arrested. In due time they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged in the parish where the crime had been committed.

Everybody was delighted, and Coombe most delighted of all, for it happened that some of their wise people had been diligently examining into the matter and had made the discovery that the woman had been murdered just outside their borders in the adjoining parish of Inkpen, so that they were going to enjoy seeing the wicked punished at somebody else's expense. Inkpen was furious and swore that it would not be saddled with the cost of a great public double execution. The line dividing the two parishes had always been a doubtful one; now they were going to take the benefit of the doubt and let Coombe hang its own miscreants!

As neither side would yield, the higher authorities were compelled to settle the matter for them, and ordered the cost to be divided between the two parishes, the gibbet to be erected on the boundary line, as far as it could be ascertained. This was accordingly done, the gibbet being erected at the highest point crossed by the line, on a stretch of beautiful smooth elastic turf, among prehistoric earthworks - a spot commanding one of the finest and most extensive views in Southern England. The day appointed for the execution brought the greatest concourse of people ever witnessed at that lofty spot, at all events since prehistoric times. If some of the ancient Britons had come out of their graves to look on, seated on their earthworks, they would have probably rubbed their ghostly hands together and remarked to each other that it reminded them of old times. All classes were there, from the nobility and gentry, on horseback and in great coaches in which they carried their own provisions, to the meaner sort who had trudged from all the country round on foot, and those who had not brought their own food and beer were catered for by traders in carts. The crowd was a hilarious one, and no doubt that grand picnic on the beacon was the talk of they country for a generation or longer. The two wretches having been hanged in chains on one gibbet were left to be eaten by ravens, crows, and magpipes, and dried by sun and winds, until, after long years, the swinging, creaking skeletons with their chains on fell to pieces and were covered with the turf, but the gibbet itself was never removed.

Then a strange thing happened. The sheep on a neighbouring farm became thin and sickly and yielded little wool and died before their time. No remedies availed and the secret of their malady could not be discovered; but it went on so long that the farmer was threatened with utter ruin. Then, by chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded person into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the cause of the malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains having been taken out of the pond and buried deep in the earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge. But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many, many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old documents that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had taken more land than she was entitled to, that not only a part but the whole of that noble hill-top belonged to her! It was Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she chuckled too soon, and Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten stump of the gibbet still in the ground. Hands off! she cried. Here stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up together and agreed that this should be the boundary line for ever. Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one. That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever been hanged on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that Inkpen is.

That was one of three strange events in the life of the village which I heard: the other two must be passed by; they would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them justice. To me the best thing in or of the village was the vicar himself, my put-upon host, a man of so blithe a nature, so human and companionable, that when I, a perfect stranger without an introduction or any excuse for such intrusion came down like a wolf on his luncheon-table, he received me as if I had been an old friend or one of his own kindred, and freely gave up his time to me for the rest of that day. To count his years he was old: he had been vicar of Coombe for half a century, but he was a young man still and had never had a day's illness in his life - he did not know what a headache was.

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