"The lightning was
enough to frighten even an older horse than the gypsy's.--I wonder how my
friend is getting on! He must think me very ungrateful! But I daresay he
imagines me lying fathom-deep in the bog.--You will do something for him,
won't you, Ed?"
"You shall do for him yourself what you please, Ed," answered my own
uncle, "and I will help you."
"But, uncle Edmund," I said, "if it was you we saw, the place you were in
was a very boggy one always, and nearly a lake then!"
"I thought I should never get out!" he replied. "But for the poor horse
and his owner, I should not have minded."
"How _did_ you get out of it, uncle?" I persisted. "Lady Cairnedge
smothered a splendid black horse not far from there. Through the darkness
I heard him going down. It makes me shudder every time I think of it."
"I cannot tell you, child. I suppose my gray was such a skeleton that the
bog couldn't hold him. I left it all to him, and he got himself and me
too out of it somehow. It was too dark, as you know, to see anything
between the flashes. I remember we were pretty deep sometimes."
He went back to London after that, and had come and gone once or twice,
he said. When he came he always lodged with his gypsy friend. He had
learned that his father was dead, but took the Mr. Whichcote he heard
mentioned, for his elder brother, David, my father.
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