“What a pretty little lady!” said the man, holding out a very dirty hand. “Come here, missy!”
But Marian shrank back with a smothered cry.
“I’ve finished my dinner, I have,” said the man, getting up.
“So have I,” echoed the woman, following his example; “and we’ll go for a walk with little miss.”
“What a precious lonely road!” she remarked, when she had glanced this way and that, to make sure that no prying eyes were near. “Catch hold o’ the little ’un, Jake; and we’ll take a stroll in the fields.”
There was a perfect understanding between this precious pair; and Marian was promptly lifted over a five-barred gate, and led by the woman across a grass field, towards a wood on the other side, while the man followed stolidly in the rear. A few paces from the gate Marian’s shoe came off; but she was as much too frightened to say anything about it, as she was to ask any questions of her captors, or to resist their will. Having reached the wood, they plunged into its recesses, and at length halted before a large pool, at the edge of which there lay upon the ground the trunks of some trees which had been cut down. Taking her seat on one of these, the woman drew Marian to her side, and, while the man stood by with an evil smile, proceeded to strip off some of the child’s clothes. Marian began to cry, but was silenced with a rough shake and a threat of being thrown into the pond. Having divested the child of most of her garments, the woman took from a dirty bundle which she carried a draggled grey wool shawl, which she wrapped tightly, crosswise, around Marian’s body, and tied in a hard knot behind her back.
Perceiving that Marian had lost one of her shoes, the hag sent her husband back to look for it, while she proceeded with the metamorphosis of the hapless infant who had fallen into her hands. She smeared the little face with muddy water from the margin of the pool; she jerked out the semi-circular comb which held back Marian’s cloud of dusky hair, and let the thick locks fall in disorder about her head and face; she dragged the little sun bonnet in the green slime at the margin of the pool, and, on pretence of tying it on the child’s head, wrenched off one of the strings, which she heedlessly left lying on the ground.
At this point the man returned without the missing shoe.
“It doesn’t matter,” said his spouse. “Lend me your knife.”
She then proceeded to cut and slash Marian’s remaining shoe in a most remorseless manner, after which she replaced it on the child’s foot, and wrapped around the other foot a piece of dirty rag.