It happened in the early Spring, just when the days were perceptibly lengthening, and a balmy feeling was creeping into the air, and a glad sense of hope was throbbing throughout the whole of nature. A boy of ten, or may be a couple of years younger, tired out after a hard day of play and pleasure, sat resting on a log near a lonely house, in a sparsely populated district. As he sat, he gazed down a long stretch of white and dusty road leading away past the house. As a rule, few and far between would be the travellers who used that unfrequented road. The sole exception would be on a Sunday, when perhaps a dozen or more of the neighbours might be seen wending their way, to or from the nearest place of worship. Intense, therefore, was the boy's surprise, when on this week-day, his eyes discerned a goodly company turning the corner in the distance, and proceeding in an orderly procession along the stretch of straight road which his vantage ground commanded. He watched it keenly, and wondered greatly. Never had he before seen such a crowd on that particular road. As the people drew nearer and nearer, something of solemnity in their orderly and silent manner struck on the watcher's imagination, but no sense of anything akin to the supernatural obsessed his mind for a second, still he failed not to mark, that for so large an assemblage, it was remarkably noiseless. Twenty yards, more or less, from where the youthful watcher sat, a footpath leading over a piece of wet and barren land joined the road. This path, which could be traversed only in dry weather, terminated half a mile away, at the door of a solitary cottage inhabited by a farm hand named Williams, who dwelt there with his wife and several young children. When the crowd arrived at the spot where the path ran on to the road, there seemed to be a momentary hesitation, and then the procession left the road and took to the footpath. The watcher strained every nerve, in an effort to recognise some one or other in the crowd, but though there was something strangely familiar about it all, there was also something so dim and shadowy, as to preclude the possibility of knowing anyone with certainty; but as the tail end of the procession curved round to gain the path, something he did observe, which caused a thrill, for the last four men carried high on their shoulders a bier,--but it was an empty bier. Soon as the multitude was out of sight, the boy rushed to the house, and related his curious experience. No thought of anything weird and uncanny had so far crossed his mind, and his one desire at the time was to gain some information as to where the people were bound for. Neither could he just then understand the manifest consternation, and the hushed awe, which fell upon his hearers as he unfolded his tale. Amongst these there happened to be a visitor, an old dame of a class well known in many parts of rural Wales in those days. It was her habit to stroll from farm to farm along the country