reasons best known to himself, he abjured the tenets of that creed
and conformed to the doctrines of Protestantism. However, in after
years he seemed to waver, and refused going to church, and by his
manner of living seemed to favour the dogmas of infidelity or atheism.
He was rather dark and reserved in his manner, and oftentimes sullen
and gloomy in his temper; and this, joined with his well-known
disregard of religion, served to render him somewhat unpopular
amongst his neighbours and acquaintances. However, he was in general
respected, and was never insulted or annoyed. He was considered
as an honest, inoffensive man, and as he was well supplied with
firearms and ammunition,--in the use of which he was well practised,
having, in his early days, served several years in a yeomanry
corps,--few liked to disturb him, even had they been so disposed.
He was well educated, and decidedly hostile to every species of
superstition, and was constantly jeering his old housekeeper, who
was extremely superstitious, and pretended to be entirely conversant
with every matter connected with witchcraft and the fairy world.
He seldom darkened a neighbour's door, and scarcely ever asked any
one to enter his, but generally spent his leisure hours in reading,
of which he was extremely fond, or in furbishing his firearms, to
which he was still more attached, or in listening to and laughing
at the wild and blood-curdling stories of old Moya, with which her
memory abounded. Thus he spent his time until the period at which
our tale commences, when he was about fifty years of age, and old
Moya, the housekeeper, had become extremely feeble, stooped, and
of very ugly and forbidding exterior. One morning in the month of
November, A.D. 1818, this man arose before daylight, and on coming
out of the apartment where he slept he was surprised at finding old
Moya in the kitchen, sitting over the raked-up fire, and smoking
her tobacco-pipe in a very serious and meditative mood.