WOODLAND TWILIGHT: TRAITORS ON THE GIBBET In a hedge that joined a wood, and about a hundred yards from it, there was a pleasant hiding-place beside a pollard ash.

The bank was hollow with rabbit-buries: the summer heat had hardened the clay of the mound and caused it to crack and crumble wherever their excavations left a precipitous edge.

Some way up the trunk of the tree an immense flat fungus projected, roughly resembling the protruding lip of a savage enlarged by the insertion of a piece of wood.

If formed a black ledge standing out seven or eight inches, two or three inches thick, and extending for a foot or more round the bark.

The pollard, indeed, was dead inside, and near the ground the black touch-wood showed.