“It so befel that I visited, the day after, one of the chief agricultural inhabitants of the village; and I found the farmer and his men standing by a ditch wherein lay, heels upward, a fine young horse, quite dead. ‘Here, sir,’ he shouted, as I came on, ‘only please to look: is not this a sight to see?’ I looked at the poor animal and uttered my sympathy and regret at the loss. ‘One of the fearful results,’ I said, ‘of the storm yesterday.’ ‘There, Jem,’ said he to one of his men triumphantly, ‘didn’t I say the parson would find it out? Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘it is as you say: it is all that wretched old Cherry Parnell’s doing, with her vengeance and her noise.’ I stared with astonishment at this unlooked-for interpretation which he had put into my mouth, and waited for him to explain. ‘You see, sir,’ he went on to say, ‘the case was this: Old Cherry came up to my place, tottering along, and mumbling that she wanted a fagot of wood. I said to her: “Cherry, I gave you one only two days agone, and another two days before that; and I must say that I didn’t make up my woodrick altogether for you.” So she turned away, looking very grany, and muttering something. Well, sir, last night as I was in bed, I and my wife, all to once there bursted a thunderbolt and shaked the very room and house. Up we started, and my wife says: “Oh, father, old Cherry’s up! I wish I had gone after her with that there faggot.” I confess I thought in my mind, I wish she had; but it was too late then, and I would try to hope for the best. But now, sir, you see with your own eyes what that revengeful old woman has been and done. And I do think, sir,’ he went on to say, changing his tone to a kind of indignant growl, ‘I do think, that when I call to mind how I’ve paid tithe and rates faithfully all these years and kept my place in church before your reverence every Sunday and always voted in the vestries that what hath and be ought to be—I do think that such ones as old Cherry Parnell never ought to be allowed to meddle with such things as thunder and lightning.’” A farmer came to Mr. Hawker once with the complaint: “Parson, I’ve lost my brown speckled hen; I reckon old Cherry have been and conjured her away. I wish you’d be so gude as to draw a circle, and find out where my brown speckled hen have been spirited away to.” The vicar had his cross-handled walking-stick in his hand, a sort of Oriental pastoral staff; and he forthwith drew a circle in the dust and sketched a pentacle within it—Solomon’s seal, in fact—whilst he thought the matter over. “I believe, Thomas,” said he, “the brown speckled hen has never got out of your lane; the hedges are walled and high.” In the afternoon back came the farmer. “Parson, you’ve done for old Cherry with your circle. I found the brown speckled hen in our lane.”