, for lace, tapes, thread, ballads, and
other small matters.
"The thieves?" cried Salmon; but no one noticed him.
"There were only two servants in the house," said the gipsy; "there
might be others, but I saw them not, and one of those now stands here;"
and she fixed her eagle eye on Rebecca; "the other is Jacob."
"Jacob and Rebecca!" exclaimed Salmon; "it was my house, then, that you
were robbing, and my servants whom you were tampering with."
"Go on," said Dymock to the vagrant, whose story then proceeded to this
effect:--
She had visited the offices of this house several times; when, coming
one evening by appointment of the servants, with some view to bartering
the master's goods with her own wares, she found the family in terrible
alarm, she had come as she said, just at the crisis in which a soul had
parted, and it was the soul of that same old lady who had been playing
with the infant on the grass-plot.
Rebecca was wailing and groaning in the kitchen, for she needed help to
streak the corpse, and the family had lived so close and solitary, that
she knew of no one at hand to whom to apply, and she feared that the
dead would become stark and cold, before she could find help; Jacob was
not within, he had gone to London, to fetch a Doctor of their own creed,
and was not likely to be back for some time.
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