In order to explain the reason of this unwonted condition of his usually well-regulated mind, we must go back some few hours, and relate the events of the morning. At his dinner-hour Jack had gone with a bundle of mended boots and shoes to the village, by which name were dignified the dozen or so of thatched and whitewashed cottages, clustered under the brow of Bryn Afon, the old Castle Hill, which loomed above the river and the tiny workshop. Though well content to spend his working hours and solitary nights in his own lonely dwelling, Jack was by no means averse to spending his meal-time hours amongst his neighbours, either discussing political matters with John Jones over the counter of the little shop which undertook to provide the village with the common necessaries of life--each wrapped gratis in the leaves of the most scurrilous and Puritanical of the little grocer's chapel sermons--or speculating with a group of ever-curious and never-satisfied spirits upon the nature of the mysterious curse said to hang over the half-ruined castle on the hill. Perhaps the dreary, monotonous roar of the wind and the waters, and the wild weather generally, had touched a chord of romance in the rough hearts of the villagers on this particular morning, for their converse seemed unable to take any more cheerful and healthy tone than that of the mysterious fortunes of the Bryn Afon family--at no time anything but a depressing subject. "Times back it was a good old family, and as well-kept a place as you could wish to see," said Evans the miller. "So when I was a boy I was wont to hear my old grandfather tell; not that it was so in his time whatever, but his great-grandfather could mind the good old days well enough." "And that reckoning brings us back to a matter of some three hundred years ago," remarked Master Jones reflectively; "for your family, Master Evans, has been a long-lived one these many generations. It would seem verily that the house were haunted, from the curious sounds that have been heard from within, and from the unwillingness of the family to reside therein for the space of more than three or four days together."