“’And to the Memory of one
FRITZ (?  Sempach)
a Humble Native of Alsace
whose remains, by Destiny commingled
with the foregoing,
are for convenience here deposited. 
II.  Kings iv. 39.’

“But the extraordinary part of my story, gentlemen, remains to be told.  Some six weeks ago, happening, in search of a theatrical engagement, to find myself in the neighbourhood of Stonehenge, I fell in with a pedestrian whose affability of accost invited me to a closer acquaintance.  He introduced himself as the Reverend Josias Micklethwaite, a student of Nature, and more particularly of the mosses and lichens of Wilts.  Our liking (I have reason to believe) was mutual, and we spent a delightful ten days in tracking up together the course of the Wiltshire Avon, and afterwards in perambulating the famous forest of Savernake.  Here, I regret to say, a trifling request—­for the loan of five shillings, a temporary accommodation—­led to a misunderstanding, and put a period to our companionship, and I remain his debtor but for some hours of profitable intercourse.

“Coming at the close of a day’s ramble to Pewsey, a small town near the source of the Avon, we visited its parish churchyard and happened upon the memorial to the unfortunate Robinsons.  An old man was stooping over the turf beside it, engaged in gathering mushrooms, numbers of which grew in the grass around this stone, but nowhere else in the whole enclosure.  The old man, who proved to be the sexton, assured us not only of this, but also that previous to the interment of the Robinsons no mushrooms had grown within a mile of the spot.  He added that, albeit regarded with abhorrence by the more superstitious inhabitants of Pewsey, the fungi were edible, and gave no trouble to ordinary digestions (his own, for example); nor upon close examination could Mr. Micklethwaite detect that they differed at all from the common agaricus campestris.  So, sirs, concludes my tale.”

Mr. Fett ended amid impressive silence.

“I don’t feel altogether so keen-set as I did five minutes back,” muttered Billy Priske.

“For my part,” said Mr. Fett, anointing the gridiron with a pat of ship’s butter, “I offer no remark upon it beyond the somewhat banal one by which we have all been anticipated by Hamlet.  ’There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—­’.”

“Faith, and so there are,” broke in Nat Fiennes, catching me on a sudden by the arm.  “Listen!”

High on the forest ridge, far and faint, yet clear over the pine-tops, a voice was singing.

The voice was a girl’s—­a girl’s, or else some spirit’s; for it fell to us out of the very dawn, pausing and anon dropping again in little cadences, as though upon the waft of wing; and wafted with it, wave upon wave, came also the morning scent of the macchia.

We could distinguish no words, intently though we listened, or no more than one, which sounded like Mortu, mortu, mortu, many times repeated in slow refrain before the voice lifted again to the air.  But the air itself was voluble between its cadences, and the voice, though a woman’s, seemed to challenge us on a high martial note, half menacing, half triumphant.