, and his experiments on the inflammability of the
diamond; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see the sort of
stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the
minister of the parish for a set of specimens; and the minister
straightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a
difficult one, to one of his poorer parishioners, an old nailer, as a
means of putting a few shillings in his way.

It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad
accident, only a few weeks before; and the story went abroad that the
poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, "coming back." She had
been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay
after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor,
her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and,
half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead,
at the bottom of the harbour. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled
business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering after nightfall
about her old dwelling, or sauntering along the neighbouring street;
nay, there were occasions, according to the general report, in which she
had even exchanged words with some of the neighbours, little to their
satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have
wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember
seeing the wife of a neighbour rush into my mother's one evening about
this time, speechless with terror, and declare, after an awful pause,
during which she had lain half-fainting in a chair, that she had just
seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere
darkness had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood for fuel
outside the door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the
heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the deceased, and, in a
light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere the fatal
accident, for a share of the brushwood. "Give me some of that _hag_,"
said the ghost; "you have plenty--I have none." It was not known whether
or no the nailer had seen the apparition; but it was pretty certain he
believed in it; and as the "Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary,
and had forty years ago a bad name to boot--for the mermaid had been
observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights and
screams heard from it at nights--it must have been a rather formidab