Crossword-Solution: BELDAMES 8 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 13

Between two games of boston, or out walking in the Jardin Turc, the old beldames with whom the widow gossiped all day had succeeded in rousing in their friend’s stony heart some scruples as to her former life, some visions of the future, some fears of hell, and some hopes of forgiveness if she should return in sincerity to a religious life.

One of these beldames was caught walking away with a couple of handmills from a plague-struck dwelling, and another had looted a tenement where John Rucock's corpse lay; she too had stripped the dead! It is not a little curious to notice how that love of going to law which old Fuller two hundred years ago remarked upon as a characteristic of Norfolk men comes out again when the confusion had begun to subside.

Hereward was more than half-minded to have put his dagger--the only weapon which he had--into the two old beldames on the spot.

Then, no doubt, the innocent charms and rhyming prayers of the old religion were regarded as incantations, and twisted into evidence against miserable beldames who mumbled over in their dotage what they had learned at their mother's knee.

APOLLO Lo, I desert thee never: to the end, Hard at thy side as now, or sundered far, I am thy guard, and to thine enemies Implacably oppose me: look on them, These greedy fiends, beneath my craft subdued! See, they are fallen on sleep, these beldames old, Unto whose grim and wizened maidenhood Nor god nor man nor beast can e’er draw near.