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about him?’ said I. ‘Never was such a thing seen in this place, not since Queen Mary’s times and the Pope and all,’ said Mrs. Maple. ‘Why, do you know he lived in this very house, him and them that was with him, and for all I can tell in this identical room’ (she shifted her feet uneasily on the floor). ‘Who was with him? Do you mean the people of the house?’ said Uncle Oldys suspiciously. ‘Not to call people, Doctor, dear no,’ was the answer; ‘more what he brought with him from Ireland, I believe it was. No, the people in the house was the last to hear anything of his goings-on. But in the town not a family but knew how he stopped out at night: and them that was with him, why they were such as would strip the skin from the child in its grave; and a withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost, says Mr. Simpkins. But they turned on him at the last, he says, and there’s the mark still to be seen on the minster door where they run him down. And that’s no more than the truth, for I got him to show it to myself, and that’s what he said. A lord he was, with a Bible name of a wicked king, whatever his godfathers could have been thinking of.’ ‘Saul was the name,’ said Uncle Oldys. ‘To be sure