They rode on, Will gazing busily about him. They were still in the town, indeed in an important part of it, for before them rose the prison. Without it stood pillory and stocks, two men by the legs in the latter, a dozen children deliberately pelting them with rotten vegetables, shards, and mud. Aderhold stared with a frown, the countryman with a curious mixture of interest in the event and lumpish indifference as to the nature of it. “Aye,” he repeated, “the village of Hawthorn.” “Is there,” asked Aderhold, “a physician in the village?” They had passed the prison, and were approaching the sculptured portal of the great church. “A physician?” said Will. “No. There was one, but he died two years ago. Now they send here, or the schoolmaster will bleed at a pinch or give a drench. And sometimes they go—but the parson would stop that—to old Mother Spuraway.” They were now full before the great portal of the church. Carthew, ahead, stopped his horse to speak to some person who seemed an acquaintance. His halting in the narrow way halted the mules with the litter. Master Hardwick had fallen into a doze. The physician and serving-man, standing their horses together, looked up at the huge pile of the church, towering like a cliff immediately above them. On each side of the vast arched doorway had stood in niches the figures of saints. These were broken and gone—dragged down in the day when the neighbouring abbey was closed. But around and about, overhead and flanking the cavernous entrance, had been left certain carvings—a train of them—imps and devils and woe-begone folk possessed by the foul fiend. The fiend grinned over the shoulder of one like a monkey, he tugged like a wolf at the ear of another, he crept like a mouse from a woman’s mouth.... Aderhold’s gaze was upon the great tower against the sky and the rose-window out of which the stained glass was not yet broken. But Will looked lower. Something presently causing the physician to glance his way, he was startled at the serving-man’s posture and expression. It was as though he had never seen these stone figures before—and, indeed, it proved that he had never been so closely within the porch, and that, in short, they had never so caught his attention. He was staring at them now as though his eyeballs and all imagination behind them were fastened by invisible wires to the grotesque and horrible carvings. Into his countenance came a creeping terror and a kind of fearful exaltation. Aderhold knew the look—he had seen it before, in France and elsewhere, upon peasant faces and upon faces that were not those of peasants. It was not an unusual look in his century. Again, for the millionth time, imagination had been seized and concentrated upon the Satanic and was creating a universe to command. Will shivered, then he put his hand to his ear. “There is nothing there,” said the physician, “but your ear itself.”