"Song, Master Mark? Save us, no! A song makes your eyes water if it's about solemn things, or it makes you laugh if it's comic; but this made the marrow in my bones turn hard as taller, for it went through me; and as I watched them, they all got up and joined hands, and began to walk slowly round the great pot over the fire, and the light shone on their horrible faces and long ragged gowns. I wanted to run away, but my legs was all of a tremble. I'd ha' give anything to run, but they legs wouldn't go, and there I stood, watching 'em as they danced round the fire a little faster, and a little faster, till they were racing about, singing and screeching. And then all at once they stopped and shouted `Wow?' all together, and burst into the most horrid shrecking laughter you ever heered, and the light went out. That seemed to set my legs going, master, and I turned to get away as fast as ever I could go, when I heered some kind o' wild bird whistle over the mountain-side, and another answered it close to me: and before I knew where I was, the great bird fluttered its wings over me, and I caught my foot in a tuft of heather, and fell." "Well, and what then?" asked Mark. "Nothing, sir, only that I ran all the way home to my cottage yonder, and you ask my wife, and she'll tell you I hadn't a dry thread on me when I got in. Now, sir, what do you say?" "All nonsense!" replied Mark bluntly, and he walked away. Another few days passed. Mark had been very quiet and thoughtful at home, reading, or making believe to read, and spending a good deal of time in the mine with Dummy Rugg, who twice over proposed that they should go on exploring the grotto-like place he had discovered; but to his surprise, his young master put it off, and the quiet, silent fellow waited. He, though, had more tales to tell of the way in which things disappeared from cottages. Pigs, sheep, poultry went in the most unaccountable way, and the witches who met sometimes on the mountain slope had the credit of spiriting them away. "Then why don't the people who lose things follow the witches up, and see if they have taken them?" "Follow 'em up, sir?" said Dummy, opening his eyes very widely. "They wouldn't dare." Then came a day when, feeling dull and bitter and as if he were not enjoying himself at home, as he did the last time he was there, Mark mounted one of the stout cob ponies kept for his and his sister's use, and went for a good long round, one which was prolonged so that it was getting toward evening, and the sun was peering over the shoulder of one of the western hills, when, throwing the rein on his cob's neck, and leaving it to pick its own way among the stones of the moorland, he entered a narrow, waste-looking dale, about four miles from the Tor.