In the days when strange things used to happen in the world, and the devil himself used sometimes to walk about in it in a bare-faced fashion, he came to a very small town where he resolved to stay a while to play some of his tricks.
On the stone, at the dead hour of the night, might be discerned a female figure wrapped in a grey cloak. She was incessantly knock, knock, knocking, in a fruitless endeavour to split the impenetrable rock.
His dress was entirely brown, the colour of the brackens, and his head covered with frizzled red hair. His countenance was expressive of the most savage ferocity, and his eyes glared like those of a bull.
‘If Jane had a child,’ said he to himself, ‘who knows but that one day it might play about here and fall in and be killed?’