"Well, sir, we was a-playing at Hide--me and Bill Jervis, and Harry Jones, and a lot of us--and the Wolsey Oak was Home. So while it was the other side's turn to hide, and we was waiting for them to cry "Whoop," we began to knife the tree a bit, to pass the time; and digging away at the bottom of the trunk, we made a hole, and presently came upon the head of this thing here, and dragged it out. Then we made a bigger hole, and please, sir, there was great big bones, and we couldn't pull them through. Then we was frightened, and called to Jem Meyrick, the keeper, as was in the booth close by; and he climbed up to the fork of the tree, and cried out that the Wolsey Oak was hollow, and there was a skeleton in it, standing up; and they do say as it's Sir Massingberd." While the boy was yet speaking, a knot of men came slowly up from the direction of the Oak, bearing something among them, and followed at a little distance by a vast crowd, all keeping an awful silence. When they got near the opening of the tent, they set their ghastly burden down upon the lawn; and we all went forth to look at it, including Marmaduke himself, with a face as pale as ashes, and clutching Lucy by the hand, as though he feared some power was about to tear her from him. I heard her whisper to him, "This may not be Lost Sir Massingberd after all." Dr. Sitwell heard her also, and at once officiously replied: "Oh, but it is, my lady; there has no man died in Fairburn for these thirty years, except the late baronet, who could have owned those bones. I will pledge my professional reputation that yonder man, when clothed in flesh and blood, was six feet four. What a large skull, and what gigantic thigh-bones!" "Ay," quoth Mr. Remnant, the general dealer, who was kneeling down beside the skeleton and examining it with minuteness, as though it had been offered to him for sale, "here is something hard and dry, with iron nails upon it, which was once a shooting-shoe, one of a pair, or I am much mistaken, which I sold to Sir Massingberd myself." "And, here," quoth Jem Meyrick, stepping forward, "is summat as I think must have been the Squire's great gold chain, which I found at the bottom of the trunk. The Wolsey Oak is quite hollow, Sir Marmaduke, although none of us knew it. It is my belief that Sir Massingberd must have climbed up into the fork to look about him, for he seemed to be expecting poachers on that night, and that the rotten wood gave way beneath him, and let him down feet foremost into the trunk."