This, however, is only a possibility comparatively picturesque. The real thing was less amusing, and the scene of it was not Wayland’s Smithy but Lone Barn. That winter a man might have picked up the paper after breakfast and found descriptions of funerals and marriages, the well-attended presentation to the local member of Parliament, the successful meeting of his rival, the list of hunting appointments, and a column and a half headed, “Suffering Children--Parental Neglect--Queer Defence--Severe Sentences--Magistrate’s Scathing Condemnation.” A capital fox-hunter presiding, the bench had given four months’ hard labour to a man and wife for neglecting their seven young children “in such a way as to cause them unnecessary suffering and injury to their health.” Having scorched his back parts the reader would turn his front parts to the fire and read on. These nine had been living for some weeks at Lone Barn, which lies unexpectedly in a small hollow at one of the highest points of the downs, three miles from the nearest hamlet. It had long been deserted. The farm-house was ruinous, and a fox taking refuge there could not be dislodged from the fallen masonry and elder and yew tree roots. The hunters had noticed nothing in the barn. I knew the farm-house and had often wondered about the man who built it in that solitude somewhere in the eighteenth century. It had walls of unusual thickness, such as could not have been overthrown simply by time and weather. It must long have been empty and subject to the hostility of discontented spirits such as probably infest a house, as they do a man, left utterly alone. I had not suspected that anybody was living in the barn, but I remember a pale, shuffling man carrying a child who begged from me monotonously as I came down the hill in mist a little before dark. I had given him something without exactly realizing that he was a man, so frail, subdued, and weak-voiced had he been--a creation of the mist quite in harmony with the hour. This was probably Arthur Aubrey Bishopstone, who was now in prison.