In the thicket, along the slopes near the ivied walls of Hawarth
Castle, the companions began to fill their baskets. Hours passed. The
sun was sinking near the west, and Laura Silver Bell had not come
home.

Over the hatch of the farm-house door the maids leant ever and anon
with outstretched necks, watching for a sign of the girl's return, and
wondering, as the shadows lengthened, what had become of her.

At last, just as the rosy sunset gilding began to overspread the
landscape, Bessie Hennock, weeping into her apron, made her appearance
without her companion.

Her account of their adventures was curious.

I will relate the substance of it more connectedly than her agitation
would allow her to give it, and without the disguise of the rude
Northumbrian dialect.

The girl said, that, as they got along together among the brambles
that grow beside the brook that bounds the Pie-Mag field, she on a
sudden saw a very tall big-boned man, with an ill-favoured smirched
face, and dressed in worn and rusty black, standing at the other side
of a little stream. She was frightened; and while looking at this
dirty, wicked, starved figure, Laura Silver Bell touched her, gazing
at the same tall scarecrow, but with a countenance full of confusion
and even rapture. She was peeping through the bush behind which she
stood, and with a sigh she said:

"Is na that a conny lad? Agoy! See his bonny velvet clothes, his sword