It was half-past six o'clock on a bleak evening in January. A black starless sky above, frost-bound snow-covered earth underneath, and a film of sleet falling made the hills and valleys of beautiful Westmoreland dreary and desolate as the shadowy limboes of the Inferno, where Dante describes unbaptized and heathen souls as wandering for ever in still and joyless gloom. Between two ridges of bare and rocky hill a market-cart was jogging slowly along the whitening road, and the thud of the old horse's hoofs and the rattle of the wheels were the only sounds that broke a stillness which was vault-like in the narrow valley.