doubtless in his day a sensation dramatist, but the atrocities of Medea could not enchain me, with so much dreadful mystery afoot in my immediate neighbourhood. Her departure through the air in a chariot drawn by winged dragons, was indeed a striking circumstance; but how much more wonderful was the disappearance of Sir Massingberd, who had departed no man knew how!

The news had spread like wildfire through the village. Numbers of country folk were hanging about the great gates of the avenue, drinking in the impromptu information of the lodge-keeper; but they did not venture to enter upon the forbidden ground. The universal belief among them was, I found, that their puissant lord would soon reveal himself. Doubting Castle, it was true, was for the present without its master; but it was too much to expect that he would not return to it. The whole community resembled prisoners in that fortress, who, although temporarily relieved of the tyrant's presence, had little hope but that he was only gone forth upon a ramble, and would presently return with renewed zest for human flesh. The general consternation, however, was extreme, and such as would probably not have been excited by the sudden and unexplained removal of a far better man. The rumour had already got abroad that there was to be an immediate search in the park, and that Oliver Bradford had been empowered to select such persons as he thought fit to assist in the same. There were innumerable volunteers for this undertaking, principally on account of the excessive attraction of the work itself, which promised some ghastly revelation; and secondarily, for the mere sake of getting into Fairburn Chase at all—a demesne as totally unknown to the majority of those present as the Libyan Desert. The elders indeed remembered the time when a public footpath ran right through the Chase, "close by the Heronry, and away under the Wolsey Oak, and so through Davit's Copse, into the high road to Crittenden," said one, "whereby a mile and a half was wont to be saved." "Ay, or two mile," quoth another; "and Lawyer Moth always said as though the path was ours by right, until Sir Massingberd got his son made a king's clerk in London, which shut his mouth up and the path at the same time."

"Ay," said a third, mysteriously, "and it ain't too late to try the matter again, in case the property has got into other hands."

This remark brought back at once the immediate cause of their assembling together, and I began to be made the victim of cross-examination. To avoid being compelled to give my own opinion (which I had already begun to think a slander) upon the matter in hand, I 

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