"Well, sir, it might be five-and-twenty years ago that that wreck took place. You was hardly more than out of your nursery then, I'm thinking. As for me, I was a chap of maybe forty--or maybe not so much; my old father he had just parted his last cable, as I might say, and I had just come in from a voyage to the Pacific Coast for hides, and was living in this house alone by myself. I'd come home, sir, to find the girl as had given me her word spliced to another man; and so it happened that I stayed a bachelor till after the age when many find themselves grandads. But I wedded at last, sir, as ye see, and never had cause to think the worse of myself for doing it!" "I should think not, indeed," I assented, laughing. But meanwhile I was telling myself that Agatha must be nearly twenty years old, and that if Poyntz had wedded only at the age of a grandfather, she could hardly be his own offspring by marriage. Were the doubts which her aspect had already suggested to me well founded, then? I prudently waited, in the hope that this question likewise might find its answer in the course of my host's story. "It was along about that time, sir," Poyntz continued, having acknowledged my compliment with a friendly nod, "that I first came acquainted with Scholar Gloam, as the folks called him; him that yonder point's named after, and that lived at the Laughing Mill, over there, back of the wood. But now I come for to think on it," broke off the old yarn-spinner, pulling his meerschaum out of the corner of his mouth and looking round at me, "did I ever chance to speak to ye of Scholar Gloam afore?" "I don't think you ever did; but I always like to hear about anything that has a picturesque nickname, as almost everything hereabouts seems to have." The hale old man laughed, and raked his brown fingers through his spreading beard. "In an out-of-the-way place like this, sir," said he, "where's few enough things anyway, nicknames come natural. Well, now, as touching Scholar Gloam, he died nigh a score of years ago; leastways he knocked off living in the body. For there be those," lowering his voice and wrinkling his brows, "there be those--superstitious like--ready to take affidavit of having seen him, certain days in the year, a prowling round the Laughing Mill. His grave is near by, right under the Black Oak; and maybe the place is a bit skeery.