He continued to tell me tales of lost villages, of broken houses with their chambers open to the winds, of wooden groynes that had been put up and abandoned, and a deal more well fitted to the hour and place. Suddenly I asked him about the Master of Skelf-Mary; and the light of the lantern shone on his knuckles as he thumbed his chin. “Ay, ye’re th’ new steward.... What wad ye know o’ him?” he asked, slowly. “Seeing I know nothing, you can’t get wrong.” “And that’s providential--if it was true,” he retorted. “Well, sir, if ye can’t bide while morning, ye can put your questions now.” But, though I interrogated him, he so fubbed me off with bland and wary answers that I was little the wiser by the time I desisted. The Master of Skelf-Mary, I gathered, was all but bed-ridden, and in very ill fame with such as read their Bibles (but that might have been because he had turned the chapel of the mansion into a library); but my friend was sensible, and careful to assign to others certain tales of devils and familiars and voices that servants, with their ears at the rosewood door of the library, had heard o’ nights. Nevertheless, his reluctance was evident, and by and by he pointed out a beam of light smothered in the fen-mists; that was his cottage. I supped and lay that night in his hut; and by eight o’clock next morning he had conducted me to the village of Skelf-Mary. It was much as he had described it. One or two houses on the north side of the market-place, opposite an ancient butter-cross, appeared to be tenanted, as did also a row of very poor cottages that ran towards the sea; the rest was desolate, and already grass pushed between the cobbles. Two or three folk appeared at upper windows, hearing the sound of hoofs (having no business to take them abroad, I judged they were still abed); and as we left the cottages a couple of rabbits scampered across the street. Half a mile before us lay the church and hall, and beyond it the smooth sea, with a brig motionless far out. “This road,” said the keeper, indicating a bridlepath to the right; but that was so plainly not the road that I answered shortly, “No, it isn’t,” and pushed forward towards the church. Five minutes brought me level with it; and then I stopped with an exclamation. A few yards beyond a rail of hedge-stakes the road ended as suddenly as if it had been cut off with a knife. The fencing, that was continued on either hand, straggled to the north across the middle of the graveyard, and the marks of wheels in the red clay and the unsightly mounds in which they ended showed what had recently been done. Over the rails, hulks and shoulders of earth fouled the beach; and from the point to which, with a dreadful curiosity, I advanced I saw three square ends, ochrous with the clay, sticking out to the tide like “throughs” in a stone wall. The keeper pointed to a three-inch fissure at my feet.