Even our fiercest and most mighty swordsmen, seared from all sense of right or wrong, yet have plentiful sense of fear, when brought before that white-haired man.

Not that he is rough with them, or querulous, or rebukeful; but that he has a strange soft smile, and a gaze they cannot answer, and a knowledge deeper far than they have of themselves.

Under his protection, I am as safe from all those men (some of whom are but little akin to me) as if I slept beneath the roof of the King's Lord Justiciary.
'But now, at the time I speak of, one evening of last summer, a horrible thing befell, which took all play of childhood from me.

The fifteenth day of last July was very hot and sultry, long after the time of sundown; and I was paying heed of it, because of the old saying that if it rain then, rain will fall on forty days thereafter.

I had been long by the waterside at this lower end of the valley, plaiting a little crown of woodbine crocketed with sprigs of heath--to please my grandfather, who likes to see me gay at supper-time.