Gloom that had lifted this bright afternoon on the forest edge settled again. Will the smith’s son had a strong taste for the supernatural, all the emotional in him finding that vent. It could grow to light up with strange lightnings and transform every humdrum corner of his mind. He liked to discuss these matters and feel a wind of terror prick his temples cold. He spoke oracularly, having, indeed, listened to talk at the sexton’s the night before. “There’s always an Evil Agent behind any pest, or a comet or a storm that wrecks ships or blows down chimneys. At times God uses the Evil Agent to punish the presumptuous with—as He might give Satan leave to spot with plague the town over yonder, seeing that if it could it would have the old mass-priests back! And at other times He gives the Evil Agent leave to prick and try his chosen people that they may turn like a wauling babe and cling the closer to Him. And again there may be one patch of weed in the good corn and Satan couching and holding his Sabbat there. In which case God will send plagues of Egypt, one after the other, until every soul wearing the Devil’s livery is haled forth.—Now,” said Will, and he laid it off with the sprig of thorn, “Hawthorn is for the pure faith of the Holy Scriptures, so we haven’t the plague for the reason the town hath it.—Again, put case that so we’re to love the Lord the more. Now Hawthorn and all to the north of it is known for religion. I’ve been a traveller,” said Will with unction, “and I know how we’re looked on, clear from here to the sea, and held up to the ungodly! Master Clement’s got a name that sounds to the wicked like the trump of doom and Master Harry Carthew isn’t far behind him—What did you say?” “I said naught,” said Joan. Will closed his exposition. “Now it may be that God wisheth to prick up Hawthorn to fresh zeal, and, indeed, the sexton holds that it is so that Master Clement interprets the matter. But it seemed to me and the tinker, who was there talking, too, that the third case is the likelier and that there are some ill folk among us!” Will dropped the bit of thorn. “It’s the more likely because there’s another kind of mischief going around and growing as the plague dies off. I know myself of three plough-horses gone lame in one night, and Hodgson’s cow dying without rhyme or reason, and a child at North-End Farm falling into fits and talking of a dog that runs in and out of the room, but no one else can see it. The tinker”—Will spoke with energy—“the tinker has come not long since over the border from Scotland. He says that if Hawthorn was Scotland we’d have had old Mother Spuraway and maybe others in the pennywinkis and the caschielawis before this!” Joan rose and lifted her bundle of faggots to her shoulders. The grey bird-nest she set between two boughs of the thorn tree. “What are the pennywinkis and the caschielawis?”