expression of countenance, to be the earl's fool. From this
peculiarity his fellow-servants had given him the nickname of The
Hangman; but the man himself had chosen the role of a puritan
parson, as affording the best ground-work for the display of a
humour suitable to the expression of countenance with which his
mother had endowed him. That mother was Goody Rees, concerning whom,
as already hinted, strange things were whispered. In the earlier
part of his career the fool had not unfrequently found his mother's
reputation a sufficient shelter from persecution; and indeed there
might have been reason to suppose that it was for her son's sake she
encouraged her own evil repute, a distinction involving considerable
risk, seeing the time had not yet arrived when the disbelief in such
powers was sufficiently advanced for the safety of those reported to
possess them. In her turn, however, she ran a risk somewhat less
than ordinary from the fact that her boy was a domestic in the
family of one whose eldest son, the heir to the earldom, lay under a
similar suspicion; for not a few of the household were far from
satisfied that lord Herbert's known occupations in the Yellow Tower
were not principally ostensible, and that he and his man had nothing
to do with the black art, or some other of the many regions of
occult science in which the ambition after unlawful power may
hopefully exercise itself.

Upon occasion of a family fete, merriment was in those days carried
further, on the part of both masters and servants, than in the
greatly altered relations and conditions of the present day would be
desirable, or, indeed, possible. In this instance, the fun broke out
in the arranging of a mock marriage between Thomas Rees, commonly
called Tom Fool, and a young girl who served under the cook. Half
the jest lay in the contrast between the long face of the