hint as soon as I had an opportunity of speaking to her
privately. The lady answered that it was too long a story to tell
then, and explained, on my suggesting that she should relate it
on some future day, that she was about to start for her country
home the next morning. 'But,' she was good enough to add, 'as I
have been under great obligations to you for many Sundays past,
and as you seem interested in this matter, I will employ my first
leisure time after my return in telling you by writing, instead
of by word of mouth, what really happened to me on one memorable
night of my life in The Black Cottage.'

"She faithfully performed her promise. In a fortnight afterward I
received from her the narrative which I am now about to read."

BROTHER OWEN'S STORY

OF

THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK COTTAGE.

To begin at the beginning, I must take you back to the time after
my mother's death, when my only brother had gone to sea, when my
sister was out at service, and when I lived alone with my father
in the midst of a moor in the west of England.

The moor was covered with great limestone rocks, and intersected
here and there by streamlets. The nearest habitation to ours was
situated about a mile and a half off, where a strip of the
fertile land stretched out into the waste like a tongue. Here the
outbuildings of the great Moor Farm, then in the possession of my