But to those to whom that tale had been told it was a darkening unearthly and portentous, bringing with it a colder air and a deepened silence.
"Oh, Sir Thomas Dale, Sir Thomas Dale!" The voice seemed to come from the distance, and bore in its dismal cadence the melancholy of the damned.

For a moment my heart stood still, and the hair of my head commenced to rise; the next, I knew that Diccon had found an ally, not in the dead, but in the living.

The minister, standing beside me, opened his mouth again, and again that dismal voice rang through the wood, and again it seemed, by I know not what art, to come from any spot rather than from that particular tree behind whose trunk stood Master Jeremy Sparrow.
"Oh, the bodkin through my tongue! Oh, the bodkin through my tongue!" Two of the guard sat with hanging lip and lacklustre eyes, turned to stone; one, at full length upon the ground, bruised his face against the pine needles and called on the Virgin; the fourth, panic-stricken, leaped to his feet and dashed off into the darkness, to trouble us no more that day.
"Oh, the heavy chains!" cried the unseen spectre.

"Oh, the dead man in his grave!" The man on his face dug his nails into the earth and howled; his fellows were too frightened for sound or motion.

Diccon, a hardy rogue, with little fear of God or man, gave no sign of perturbation beyond a desperate tugging at the rope about his wrists.