Mrs. Inchbald paused. She was fond of telling stories. It was good practice for her art. She never gave up a life-long struggle with a stammer, that tripped her up constantly in short sentences, or conversational phrase. This stammer, however, was utterly routed by her fine-sounding and ornate sentences of narration, which she declaimed in a magnificent voice:--
There was an age of superstition which blackens history’s page. During the period immediately following the Reformation, fear of witchcraft in England was so great, that many innocent lives were sacrificed needlessly to assuage the malignant ignorance of the time. It is true that other countries were even more to blame than England, a greater number of innocent people being put to death in Germany, Italy, and France. Yet for all that, our crimes are sufficient to make us shudder in reading of them, and thankful that such things can never recur.
Let us imagine that there is a village called Wendlestone, and that it lies a distance of a mile and a half, from a large wood. There is a common on the confines of this wood, and here the dwellings of squatters, as they are called, may be seen. This means, that a man building his own hut, and driving some humble trade, such as knife-grinder or tin-waresman, might live here free of rent. One of these dwellings is the little house you see in the picture by Nasmyth, and here in the year 1545 an old woman lived. She had a tiny patch of garden, and a donkey which she drove to market with some small load of vegetables and eggs. Or more often some medicines that she compounded from herbs, with which she administered to the ailments of the country people. She was reticent, quiet, and of a stern cast of countenance, and had lived here for many years. Her people had not belonged to Wendlestone, and no one knew her origin; perhaps this first led people to look on her with distrust.
[Illustration: _Nasmyth_ THE COTTAGE BY THE WOOD]
She had herself put to rights the little tumble-down house, which let the weather in when first she appropriated it. And she had, by her industry and thrift, managed to make a comfortable living, cutting the rushes from the riverside, and thatching her own roof. Often you might see her, crouched low and bent by rheumatism, a straw hat tied beneath her nut-cracker chin, and her red cloak battling with the weather, while she gathered sticks from the woodlands, or took her donkey laden to the town.