of the rooms and corridors. No one saw the master. They said that they did not care, or they said that he was dead and buried up in leaves; but in truth they were afraid of his white hair, his quiet eye, and the strange birds and beasts. Between them, the robbers and the young men who had served him plundered the house. Some even attempted to carry off the masonry, but left most of it along the roadside where it lies to this day. At length, nothing worth a strong man’s time had been overlooked. A few beggars were the latest visitors, cursing the empty granary, trembling at the footsteps of leaves treading upon leaves in all the rooms. They did not see Ivor, sitting among leaves and spiders’ webs. A pack of hounds, hunting that way, chased the stag throughout the castle but lost it; for it entered the room where Ivor was sitting, and when the horn was blown under the new moon the hounds slunk out bloodless yet assuaged, and the hunter thrashed them for their lack of spirit, and cursed the old man for his magic, yet ventured not in search of him along those muffled corridors. The very road up to the castle was disappearing. The master, it was believed, had died. The old men who had known him were dead; the young men were at the wars. When a white-haired beggar stumbled into Abercorran from the hills few admitted, though all knew in their hearts, that it was Ivor ap Cadogan. For a year or two he was fed from door to door, but he wearied his benefactors by talking continually about his birds that he had lost. Some of the rich remembered against him his modesty, others his ostentation. The poor accused him of pride; such was the name they gave to his independent tranquillity. Perhaps, some thought, it was a judgment--the inhabitants of the Castle of Ophir had been too idle and too happy to think of the shortness of this life and the glory to come. So he disappeared. Probably he went to some part where he was not known from any other wandering beggar. “Wonderful long white beards,” said Ann, “men had in those days--longer than that old harper’s, and to-day there are none even like him. Men to-day can do a number of things which the old ages never dreamed of, but their beards are nothing in comparison to those unhappy old days when men with those long white beards used to sit by the roadsides, looking as if they had come from the ends of the earth, like wise men from the East, although they were so old that they sat still with their beards reaching to the ground like roots. Ivor ap Cadogan was one of these.”