CHAPTER III.--Mountain Legislation, and its Executive of Blood.


After dinner that day, and while the gentlemen were yet at table, Mary
and Julia, who, as we have said, had relieved their mother of those
benevolent attentions which she had been in the habit of paying to the
neighboring sick and poor, proceeded on their way to the cottage of
a destitute woman in the next village, who was then lying in what was
considered to be a hopeless state. The proctor himself, while he exacted
with a heartless and rapacious hand the last penny due to him, was yet
too good a tactician to discountenance these spontaneous effusions of
benevolence on the part of his wife and daughters. With a good deal
of ostentation, and that peculiar swagger for which many shrewd and
hard-hearted men of the world are remarkable, he actually got the
medicine himself for the helpless invalid in question, not forgetting at
the same time to make the bystanders in the apothecary's shop acquainted
with the extent of his own private charity and that of his family
besides. The girls had proceeded a part of the way on their charitable
errand, when it occurred to them that the medicine, which their father
had procured on the preceding day, had been forgotten, and as the sick
woman was to commence taking it at a certain hour that evening, it was
necessary that either one or both should return for it.

"You needn't come back, Julia," said Mary; "I will myself run home and
fetch it. And accordingly her sister went back at a quick step towards
her father's house. The spot where Julia stood to await the return, of
her sister was within a few yards of a large white-thorn double ditch,
on each side of which grew a close hedge of thorns, that could easily