'But how?
Ay, how?
But these are things that it is sin to speak of.' 'The people of that house.

.

.

' I began.
But he interrupted me with a savage outburst.

'The people ?' he cried.
'What people?
There are neither men nor women in that house of Satan's! What?
have you lived here so long, and never heard ?' And here he put his mouth to my ear and whispered, as if even the fowls of the mountain might have over-heard and been stricken with horror.
What he told me was not true, nor was it even original; being, indeed, but a new edition, vamped up again by village ignorance and superstition, of stories nearly as ancient as the race of man.