The Witch

THEY lay for a month in prison in London. Then, all procedures having been met, the law would return them to the county where they had offended and the gaol from which they had...

JOAN sat on the edge of her straw bed, with her arms around her knees and her eyes upon the blank wall. For something to do she had been plaiting straws, making braids of many s...

AT sunrise she shut the cottage door behind her, locked it, and put the key in a hiding-place under the eaves, then went down the path between the daffodils and out of the littl...

MASTER CLEMENT, the papers in his hand, retraced his steps until he came to a bench set in the shadow of a yew that knotted the minister’s house and garden to the churchyard. He...

THREE days after this conversation Gilbert Aderhold said good-bye to the Puritan woman and her son, shouldered a stick with a bundle at the end, and set his face toward the peri...

THIS was a small island or cay. They found water and they found fruit and cassava, and with these and a shelter of boughs and leaves of the little palm they raised again the fla...

THEY were moving with the second mate through a busy street, toward a harsh old pile of buildings. The mate was a watchful man. To start aside from him into some court or lane o...

IT was full dusk when the London travellers did at last win away from the Rose Tavern. The evening was cold, the snow yet falling in slow, infrequent flakes. The merchants and t...

THE SILVER QUEEN, a ship neither great nor small, high-pooped, white-sailed, her figurehead a crowned woman, her name good for seaworthiness, ploughed the green water. Her sailo...

ADERHOLD sat in the moth-eaten old chair, in the bare room, beside the bed in which, seventy-odd years before, Master Hardwick had been born and in which he was now to die. The...

LATE that winter, after long immunity, black sickness came to the town with the great church and the castle, and cast a long, crooked finger across the river and in the directio...

IT was May three years since Joan had smelled the apple tree in blossom by the well, or had marked the heartsease amid the grass. She drew her bucket of water, flashing, drippin...

WHAT were Gervaise’s and Lantern’s adventures they would hear when they reached The Moon. Their own, throughout this day, led them to no harm. They had been for long in the hand...

IT was early spring again, and on the fruit trees pale emerald buds of yet unfolded leaves. The blackbirds came in flocks to the ploughed fields. But this year there were many f...

THE inn was small and snug, near Cheapside Cross, and resorted to by men of an argumentative mind. The Mermaid Tavern, no great distance away, had its poets and players, but the...

NO Spaniards came to be driven back, had Aderhold been that magician who could do it. It was like a lost island, or the first peopled island, or the last. Day after day they wat...

TWO magistrates and certain of the clergy of the town, Justice Carthew and Master Thomas Clement from Hawthorn, sat in consultation in a room opening from the hall of assizes. C...

MASTER CLEMENT sat, tense and straight, spiritually girded to meet Satan and his legionaries. Harry Carthew was standing when Aderhold entered the room, but immediately he came...

HE went that morning to visit the alderman, inopportune as he knew the visit would be esteemed. But many things were inopportune—hunger, for instance. The alderman found the vis...

ADERHOLD saw no fairies, though sometimes of moonlight nights he pleased his fancy by bringing them in his mind’s eye in a ring around the oak. Hours—days—weeks passed, and stil...

FOUR days later she went to walk in Hawthorn Forest. It was a golden afternoon, and she had hastened her work and got it out of hand. The roof was mended, the beehives were back...

THE storm that had broken in the early afternoon regathered. The clouds hung low and black, the wind whistled, the rain came in gusts, now and again there was lightning and thun...

IT was winter—a mild, bright, winter’s day—when, for the second time, he met and spoke to Joan in the forest. She was standing beneath a beech tree, in her hand a dry, fallen bo...

TOWN and village and all the country roundabout were growing clean of the plague. Day by day the evil lessened, the sickness stole away. It left its graves, and among those whos...

THE WITCH JUDGE sat high; beside him his circuit fellow who was a nonentity; a step or two lower a row of local magistrates. The hall was large and high,—time-darkened, powdered...

THE slave-seekers, one hundred and fifty armed men, struck a flag into the earth before the village and demanded a parley. Their leader or captain was a tall, black-bearded pers...

A FEW miles in length, fewer in breadth, the island lay in a sub-tropic clime. During its winter all the air was neither cold nor hot, but of a happy in-between and suave perfec...

ADERHOLD looked forth from a narrow grating, so high-placed that he must stand a-tiptoe like a child to see at all. Summer without,—summer, summer, and the winds of heaven! With...

THEIR side of the earth turned, turned with ceaseless motion toward the central orb. There grew a sense of the threshold of dawn, of the chill and sunken furthest hour, when the...

THAT day and night they in the open boat merely lived to die. With each wave of a sea yet in storm Death overhung them, the foam atop gleaming down like a white skull. The boat...

IT was said that the Queen was dying. She lay at Richmond, in the palace looking out upon the wintry, wooded, March-shaken park, but London, a few miles away, had daily news of...

THE morrow came and went in heat and tenseness and excitement. The third day arrived and passed with no lessening. The fourth day came and the fever ran more high than before. T...

dripping water. The stream had a footbridge. They hesitated, but all was dark and silent. They crossed, and as they stepped upon the beaten earth on the farther side, two dogs s...