chance, it was discovered that the chains in which the
murderers had been hanged had been thrown by some evil-minded
person into a dew-pond on the farm. This was taken to be the
cause of the malady in the sheep; at all events, the chains
having been taken out of the pond and buried deep in the
earth, the flock recovered: it was supposed that the person
who had thrown the chains in the water to poison it had done
so to ruin the farmer in revenge for some injustice or grudge.
But even now we are not quite done with the gibbet! Many,
many years had gone by when Inkpen discovered from old
documents that their little dishonest neighbour, Coombe, had
taken more land than she was entitled to, that not only a part
but the whole of that noble hill-top belonged to her! It was
Inkpen's turn to chuckle now; but she chuckled too soon, and
Coombe, running out to look, found the old rotten stump of the
gibbet still in the ground. Hands off! she cried. Here
stands a post, which you set up yourself, or which we put up
together and agreed that this should be the boundary line for
ever. Inkpen sneaked off to hide herself in her village, and
Coombe, determined to keep the subject in mind, set up a
brand-new stout gibbet in the place of the old rotting one.
That too decayed and fell to pieces in time, and the present
gibbet is therefore the third, and nobody has ever been hanged
on it. Coombe is rather proud of it, but I am not sure that
Inkpen is.

That was one of three strange events in the life of the
village which I heard: the other two must be passed by; they
would take long to tell and require a good pen to do them
justice. To me the best thing in or of the village was the