pass his forge towards Bodmin about midnight. So the tale's true
enough. But since that night no man has set eyes on horse or riders.



A BLUE PANTOMIME.


I.


HOW I DINED AT THE "INDIAN QUEENS."

The sensation was odd; for I could have made affidavit I had never
visited the place in my life, nor come within fifty miles of it.
Yet every furlong of the drive was earmarked for me, as it were, by some
detail perfectly familiar. The high-road ran straight ahead to a notch
in the long chine of Huel Tor; and this notch was filled with the yellow
ball of the westering sun. Whenever I turned my head and blinked, red
simulacra of this ball hopped up and down over the brown moors. Miles
of wasteland, dotted with peat-ricks and cropping ponies, stretched to
the northern horizon: on our left three long coombes radiated seaward,
and in the gorge of the midmost was a building stuck like a fish-bone,
its twisted Jacobean chimneys overtopping a plantation of ash-trees that
now, in November, allowed a glimpse, and no more, of the grey facade. I
had looked down that coombe as we drove by; and catching sight of these
chimneys felt something like reassurance, as if I had been counting, all
the way, to find them there.

But here let me explain who I am and what brought me to these parts.