As soon as Butler landed from the skiff, he threw his cloak into the hands of the sergeant; then, with a disturbed haste, sprang upon his horse, and, commanding Robinson to follow, galloped along the road down the river as fast as the nature of the ground and the obscurity of the hour would allow. A brief space brought them to the spot where the road crossed the stream, immediately in the vicinity of the widow Dimock's little inn, which might here be discerned ensconced beneath the cover of the opposite hill. The low-browed wooden building, quietly stationed some thirty paces off the road, was so adumbrated in the shelter of a huge willow, that the journeyer, at such an hour as this, might perchance pass the spot unconsciously by, were it not for an insulated and somewhat haggard sign-post that, like a hospitable seeker of strangers, stood hard by the road side, and there displayed a shattered emblem in the guise of a large blue ball, a little decayed by wind and weather, which said Blue Ball, without superscription or device, was universally interpreted to mean "entertainment for man and horse, by the widow Dimock." The moonlight fell with a broad lustre upon the sign post and its pendent globe; and our travellers, besides, could descry, through the drapery of the willow, a window, of some rear building of the inn, richly illuminated by what, from the redness of the light, might be conjectured to be a bundle of blazing faggots. As the horses had, immediately upon entering the ford, compelled their masters to a halt, whilst they thrust their noses into the water and drank with the greediness of a long and neglected thirst, it was with no equivocal self-gratulation that Robinson directed his eye to the presignifications of good cheer which were now before him. Butler had spoken "never a word," and the sergeant's habits of subordination, as well as an honest sympathy in what he guessed to be the griefs of his superior officer, had constrained him to a respectful silence. The sergeant, however, was full of thoughts which, more than once during the gallop from the Fawn's Tower, he was on the point of uttering by way of consolation to Butler, and which nothing prevented but that real delicacy of mind that lies at the bottom of a kind nature, and inhabits the shaggy breast of the rustic, at least full as often as it lodges in the heart of the trim worldling. The present halt, seemed, in Horse Shoe's reckoning, not only to furnish a pretext to speak, but, in some degree, to render it a duty; and, in truth, an additional very stimulating subject presented itself to our good squire, in his instantaneous conviction that the glare from the tavern window had its origin in some active operation which, at this late hour, might be going on at the kitchen chimney; to understand the full pungency of which consideration, it is necessary to inform my reader, that Robinson had, for some time past, been yielding himself to certain doubts, whether his