appeared slowly to remember him, and said, as she raised herself on one
hand, and pointed the other towards him with an inquiring gesture,--"Thou
hast brought the book?"

Dummie answered by lifting up the book he had brought from the honest
butcher's.

"Clear the room, then," said the sufferer, with that air of mock command
so common to the insane. "We would be alone!"

Dummie winked at the good woman at the foot of the bed; and she (though
generally no easy person to order or to persuade) left, without
reluctance, the sick chamber.

"If she be a going to pray," murmured our landlady (for that office did
the good matron hold), "I may indeed as well take myself off, for it's
not werry comfortable like to those who be old to hear all that 'ere!"

With this pious reflection, the hostess of the Mug,--so was the hostelry
called,--heavily descended the creaking stairs. "Now, man," said the
sufferer, sternly, "swear that you will never reveal,--swear, I say! And
by the great God whose angels are about this night, if ever you break the
oath, I will come back and haunt you to your dying day!"

Dummie's face grew pale, for he was superstitiously affected by the
vehemence and the language of the dying woman, and he answered, as he
kissed the pretended Bible, that he swore to keep the secret, as much as
he knew of it, which, she must be sensible, he said, was very little. As
he spoke, the wind swept with a loud and sudden gust down the chimney,
and shook the roof above them so violently as to loosen many of the