"Now, if there be not old Cicely," first went round in a whisper; then a
deep silence gradually pervaded the assembly.
She had just hobbled down to the cross, and the audience seemed to watch
her looks with awe and suspicion.
"What, none o' ye? Come, Uctred, thou shalt shame these big-tongued,
wide-mouthed boasters."
A short swarthy-looking boy, with a leering and unfavourable
countenance, here stepped forward, taking his station upon one of the
steps beside his mother. A notion had gone abroad that the boy was the
fruit of some unhallowed intercourse with an immortal of the fairy or
pixy kind, whose illicit amours the old woman had wickedly indulged. She
too, was thought to bear in some degree a charmed life, and to hold
communion with intelligences not of the most holy or reputable order.
The boy was dumb. His lips had, however, at times a slight and tremulous
movement, which strongly impressed the beholders that some discourse was
then carrying on between "the dummy," as he was generally called, and
his invisible relatives. His whole aspect was singularly painful and
forbidding. No wonder, in these times of debasing superstition, that his
person should be looked on with abhorrence, and even a touch from him be
accounted an evil of no slight import.
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