"Keep that all th' days o' your life; nivver part wi' it, wet or fine. Yo'll allus know th' weather by it, as guid as a glass an' better nor bi a mony on 'em. An' as long as that caul's thine, drowneded bi watter yo' canna be. There's mony a fine spark at sails the seas 'ud be main glad o' that same. Hanged yo' may be, tho' God forbid, but drownded nivver." And in after years, of which the reader shall read in good time, Moll o' Stuarts was able to invoke her prophetic soul, and to attribute to her own prescience the wonderful deliverance this story shall narrate. Moll, too, brought a pair of stout stockings knit by the widow Schofield's own plump hands, and a crown-piece, that the night before had jingled in Tom o' Fairbank's well-filled leathern purse. Over the hills trudged the Schoolmaster and his ward; the dominie thoughtful, and not a little sorrowful. "Pray God we've done for the best," was his pious hope, as they reached the low wall of the Church of St. Chad's, and one at least thought of the fair unknown, whose son was setting forth into the untried paths of life, with all the glad, unquestioning undoubting confidence of eager youth. Hard by the Church Inn they turned to the face of the steep ascent of almost unbroken moorland, threaded by a rude and rutty path, strewn with rubble and boulders, torn and wrenched from the crags above by the driving storms and angry raging winds of the rolling years. On the lower face of the hill they passed, here and there, the rude shelter of a moorland cottier, whose cow and pig and poultry gained precarious living in the lean enclosures won from the sweeping stretch of heather and coarse grass or the lowly cottage whence the familiar clack of the hand-loom told of swaying beam and scudding shuttle. Anon they reached the summit; Mr. Black, notwithstanding the help from Tom's sturdy arm, fain to rest upon one of the vast rocks belched forth from the bowels of the earth in some angry vomiting of the prisoned airs, and now, rounded and smooth-worn and dark with the gloom of ages, resting massive on the commanding summit called Pots and Pans. "Yes, that indeed, is Bill's o' Jack s," panted Mr. Black, in answer to Tom's eager questioning. "That is where the murder was done, murder most foul. Poor hapless Bill and Tom, I knew them well, a hale and hearty farmer, and his son a strapping gamekeeper. Done to death, whether for gain or revenge, none knew for certain, though it was shrewdly guessed, but nothing was ever proved and for ought is known, the murderers may dwell in our very midst. See yon little window left of the door, 'twas the old man's bedroom. There, in a pool of blood, his lifeless body was found; his son,--his head cleaved by a heavy bill-lay lifeless in the kitchen. It was a little wench, who went betimes for milk, gave the alarm." "Was it long gone sir?" asked Tom, gazing spellbound at the farmhouse in the valley's dip.