"Coming at the close of a day's ramble to Pewsey, a small town near the source of the Avon, we visited its parish churchyard and happened upon the memorial to the unfortunate Robinsons. An old man was stooping over the turf beside it, engaged in gathering mushrooms, numbers of which grew in the grass around this stone, _but nowhere else in the whole enclosure_. The old man, who proved to be the sexton, assured us not only of this, but also that previous to the interment of the Robinsons no mushrooms had grown within a mile of the spot. He added that, albeit regarded with abhorrence by the more superstitious inhabitants of Pewsey, the fungi were edible, and gave no trouble to ordinary digestions (his own, for example); nor upon close examination could Mr. Micklethwaite detect that they differed at all from the common _agaricus campestris_. So, sirs, concludes my tale." Mr. Fett ended amid impressive silence. "I don't feel altogether so keen-set as I did five minutes back," muttered Billy Priske. "For my part," said Mr. Fett, anointing the gridiron with a pat of ship's butter, "I offer no remark upon it beyond the somewhat banal one by which we have all been anticipated by Hamlet. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio--'." "Faith, and so there are," broke in Nat Fiennes, catching me on a sudden by the arm. "Listen!" High on the forest ridge, far and faint, yet clear over the pine-tops, a voice was singing. The voice was a girl's--a girl's, or else some spirit's; for it fell to us out of the very dawn, pausing and anon dropping again in little cadences, as though upon the waft of wing; and wafted with it, wave upon wave, came also the morning scent of the _macchia_. We could distinguish no words, intently though we listened, or no more than one, which sounded like _Mortu, mortu, mortu_, many times repeated in slow refrain before the voice lifted again to the air. But the air itself was voluble between its cadences, and the voice, though a woman's, seemed to challenge us on a high martial note, half menacing, half triumphant. Nat Fiennes had sprung to his feet, musket in hand, when another and less romantic sound broke the silence of the near woods; and down through a glade on the slope above us, where darkness and day yet mingled in a bluish twilight under the close boughs, came scampering back the hogs described to us by Mr. Fett. Apparently they had recovered from their fright, for they came on at a shuffling gallop through the churchyard gate, nor hesitated until well within the enclosure. There, with much grunting, they drew to a standstill and eyed us, backing a little, and sidling off by twos and threes among the nettles under the wall. "They are tame hogs run wild," said my father, after studying them for a minute. "They have lost their masters, and evidently hope we have succeeded to the care of their troughs."