It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas’s, the shortest day in the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and its occupant in the sunshine of a few days earlier.
Norcombe Hill—forming part of Norcombe Ewelease—was one of the spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth.
It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil—an ordinary specimen of those smoothly outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.
The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the crest, fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane.
To-night these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan.
The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue of air occasionally ferreting out a few, and sending them spinning across the grass.
A group or two of the latest in date amongst this dead multitude had remained on the twigs which bore them till this very mid-winter time, and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.
Between this half-wooded, half-naked hill, and the vague, still horizon its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of fathomless shade—the sounds only from which suggested that what it concealed bore some humble resemblance to features here. The thin grasses, more or less coating the hill,