ne in life.

Roy sat and stared at him after the revelation, keeping silence. It may
have been that he was digesting the wonder; it may have been that he was
deliberating upon his answer.

"Look you here, Dan Duff," said he, by and by, holding the shaking boy
by the shoulder. "You just breathe that name again to living mortal, and
see if you don't get hung up by the neck for it. 'Twas nothing but
Rachel's ghost. Them ghosts takes the form of anything that it pleases,
'em to take; whether it's a dead man's, or whether it's a woman's, what
do they care? There's no ghost but Rachel's 'ud be a-hovering over that
pond. Where be your senses gone, not to know that?"

Poor Dan's senses appeared to be wandering somewhere yet; they certainly
were not in him. He shook and moaned, and finally fell into the same
sort of stupor as before. Roy could make nothing further of him, and he
went down.

"Well," said he to the assemblage, "I've got it out of him. The minute
he saw me, he stretched his arm out--'Mr. Roy,' says he, 'I'm sick to
unburden myself to somebody'; and he up and told. He's fell off again
now, like one senseless, and I question if he'd remember telling me."

"And what was it? And what was it?" questioned the chorus. "Rachel's
ghost?"

"It was nothing less, you may be sure," replied Roy, his tone expressive
of contempt that they should have thought it could be anything less.
"The young idiot must take and go by the pond on this bright night, and
in course he saw it. Right again' his face, he says, it appeared; there
wasn't no mistaking of it. It was a-walking round and round the pool."

Considerable shivering in the assembly. Polly Dawson, who was on its
outskirts, shrieked, and pushed into its midst, as if it were a safer
place. The women drew into a closer circle, and glanced round at an
imaginary ghost behind their shoulders.

"Was it that as you saw yourself to-night, Mr. Roy?"

"Never mind me," was Roy's answer. "I ain't one to be startled to death
at sight of a sperit, like boys and women is. I had my pill in what I
saw, I can tell ye. And my advice to ye all is, keep within your own
doors after nightfall."

Without further salutation, Roy departed. The women, with one accord,
began to make for the staircase. To contemplate one who had just been in
actual contact with the ghost--which some infidels had persistently
asserted throughout was nothing but a myth--was a sight not to be
missed. But they were d