She was an old woman with snow-white hair, which contrasted rather strangely with her hard red colour; but her skin was smooth, her face well shaped, with fine acquiline features. No doubt it had been a very handsome face though never beautiful, I imagine; it was too strong and firm and resolute; too like the face of some man we see, which, though we have but a momentary sight of it in a passing crowd, affects us like a sudden puff of icy-cold air--the revelation of a singular and powerful personality. Yet she was only a poor old broken-down woman in a Wiltshire village, held fast in her chair by a hopeless infirmity. With her legs paralysed she was like that prince in the Eastern tale on whom an evil spell had been cast, turning the lower half of his body into marble. But she did not, like the prince, shed incessant tears and lament her miserable destiny with a loud voice. She was patient and cheerful always, resigned to the will of Heaven, and--a strange thing this to record of an old woman in a village!--she would never speak of her ailments. But though powerless in body her mind was vigorous and active teeming with memories of all the vicissitudes of her exceedingly eventful, busy life, from the time when she left her village as a young girl to fight her way in the great world to her return to end her life in it, old and broken, her fight over, her children and grandchildren dead or grown up and scattered about the earth. Chance having now put me in her way, she concluded after a few preliminary or tentative talks that she had got hold of an ideal listener; but she feared to lose me--she wanted me to go on listening for ever. That was the reason of that painfully intense hungry look in her eyes; it was because she discovered certain signs of lassitude or impatience in me, a desire to get up and go away and refresh myself in the sun and wind. Poor old woman, she could not spring upon and hold me fast when I attempted to move off, or pluck me back with her claws; she could only gaze with fiercely pleading eyes and say nothing; and so, without being fascinated, I very often sat on listening still when I would gladly have been out-of-doors. She was a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects, chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who had lived in the village and who had long been turned to dust. They were all more or less tragical in character, and it astonished me to think that I had stayed in a dozen or twenty, perhaps forty, villages in Wiltshire, and had heard stories equally strange and moving in pretty well every one of them.