There were ghosts at Thorn that autumn—but solid, hungry, and most gluttonous ghosts, who seemed to have abundance of good beer and food stowed away in the huge cupboards of the kitchen. The kitchen and the two rooms over it had been made habitable for the MacAlisters, and were now used by the new spirits who haunted Thorn—a big, stocky man, with a back like a flagstone; a comely, broad-hipped woman, with black eyes and a tight, hard face. They had come there suddenly, when the moon was full, walking by the woodland track from a great black coach that had set them down upon the high-road. One evening in October, as the dusk was falling, the figure of a man, a burly blotch of darkness in the half light of the yard, came across from an out-building that was used as a wood-shed with an apron full of oak blocks for the fire. Farmer Knapp, he who had come to steal bricks, had told how he had come to the gate of Thorn and had seen through the grill, not a foot from his own eyes, a great white face as big as the moon when full. Farmer Knapp had not taken a second look, and, although it was only three in the afternoon, he had jumped into his wagon and driven off with his cart-horses lumbering at a canter. Now the man who crossed the court-yard, carrying his billets of wood, had a piece of white cloth covering his face, tied under the chin and about the forehead, with two holes for the eyes and a slit where the mouth should be. The huge calves of the man’s legs rubbed together as he walked, and under the brim of his beaver his pate was as bald as the ivory knob of a gentleman’s cane. He went down into the kitchen by three steps and a short passageway, and tumbled his wood into a corner of the open hearth. At the table the woman was stirring something in a basin. A big black pot hung on a rack and chain over the fire, and on the bricks before the hearth lay a dog of the mastiff breed, who lifted his head and blinked when the man entered. “Supper ready?” “Throw some more wood on, Sim, will ye?” The man tossed two or three blocks into the red heart of the fire, pulled a rough settle forward with one foot, and sat down and stared at the pot. The firelight glittered on the eyes behind the white cloth, showing up the red lids unshaded by the trace of an eyelash. “Lord, what a dull hole this is, or I’m saved!” The woman had her sleeves turned up, and her big forearms were brown and comely. “Dull,” said the man, “when there’s plenty to eat?” “And drink, Sim?” “Better than Tyburn or Newgate, anyway. Only there ain’t nothing to lay one’s fist to; not so much as a dog for old Blizzard to take by the throat.” “Turn smuggler, my dear, if you want to let blood.” The man sniffed at the pot. “Smuggler? No, thank ye; we don’t want none of those gentry inside Thorn. Stodging about the country for a keg of liquor when we can have it for going to the cupboard! This deuced viz of mine smarts like hot Hollands to-night.”