"Heigh-ho," exclaimed Red Geordie, who felt it his duty to restore the conversation to a more natural tone, "I'll have to be taking the road again. It's a dree day for a body to be riding through the Girdlestone, a dree day, but less dree than it used to be before the Shepherd's Rest was built. I mind well, when the snow lay on the fells, and wind swept down them like a beast, trying to snap off your fingers and toes, and there was neither inn nor cot for twenty miles! Those were days! I've seen me riding with a match-lock over my shoulder and a brace of pistols in my belt, like any rumbustical cateran. What with robbers and winds and thunderstorms, the frights I got bristled up my hair so that it's never laid down since." "The first time I rode through the pass," said Timothy, "I thought I had come to the Delectable Mountains. It was a summer morning. I rode on and on in a kind of a dream till suddenly I came to a gibbet with a dead man swinging upon it. It distressed me." The little silver-headed man looked as though the memory of it still distressed him. "For the rest of my journey, I meditated upon our nature and the divine justice that is above our justice, for it sees with the eyes of mercy." "I know who he was," said Red Geordie. "You can spare your sympathy for him, master. He murdered his wife and flung her body into Quaking Hag, and that minds me, by the by, I saw the last time I passed that Devil's pot that the fence is broken." The good wife busied herself about preparing a meal. She made the fire burn brighter, and put the kettle on to boil; all the time she talked. "They say he walks round Quaking Hag at nights, carrying a light to lead witless folk into the peat holes. If the fence is down I wonder you let your horses go on their lone. They might wander from the track and you'd never see them no more." "Oh," laughed the man, "Black Geordie kens the road as well as me. With a Black Geordie in front, and a Red Geordie behind, it's not many spooks will trouble us. I'll go and whisper a word in the old fellow's lug, and send him on. He'll be past the Hag before I catch him up. He should have been a general in the army--that old fellow--for he comes clean out o' all messes." He went to the door, and soon there was the sound of hoofs upon the road. Joel saw the string of beasts disappear into the mist as they went on up the pass. Their master came back to the kitchen, and with him entered Peter Fleming. "Another glass, mistress," cried Red Geordie. "One for each of us; glasses all round; a stirrup cup for me, and a happy union for you. Your health, Master Joel Hart! and school-master Peter, here's to you!"