Late in the spring of this year, Hawk-Hollow received a new addition to its society, in the person of a stranger, who, one pleasant evening, rode up to the hovel, which, as was before mentioned, Dame Alice, or as she was more familiarly called, Elsie Bell, had, so many years before, converted into a house of entertainment. But the credit of the poor woman, now aged, infirm, and almost friendless, had long since departed; and the tongues of the ignorant and foolish, in an age when the most ridiculous superstitions were not wholly confined to the brains of children, had invested her habitation with a character which repelled alike the curious and the weary. Her age, her poverty, her loneliness, her unsocial character, and perhaps also her attachment to the memory of a family all others had learned to detest, had brought her into bad odour; and some thoughtless or malicious persons having persuaded themselves that a certain famous mortality among their cattle could have been caused by nothing short of witchcraft, it was soon determined that old Elsie had stronger claims to the character of a broom-rider than any other person in the county. It was fortunate for her that the imputation fell upon her in a land, which once, in the case of an old woman brought before a jury under the same charge, had rendered the wise and humane verdict, that they found her "guilty, not of being a witch, but of being _suspected_." It never once occurred to any individual to prosecute, or even persecute, poor Elsie; nor is it supposed that any sane man ever seriously believed a charge so cruel and absurd; yet the stain rested upon the unfortunate creature, and was the cause of her losing all the little custom of her house, and being, at one period, reduced to great straits.