e ghastly
hair-on-end story, that would make the parish religious. Perhaps it will
have one some day to make it complete; but there's not a word of
the kind now. There, I wouldn't live there for all that. In fact, I
couldn't. O no, I couldn't.'

'Why couldn't you?'

'The sounds.'

'What are they?'

'One is the waterfall, which stands so close by that you can hear that
there waterfall in every room of the house, night or day, ill or well.
'Tis enough to drive anybody mad: now hark.'

He stopped the horse. Above the slight common sounds in the air came the
unvarying steady rush of falling water from some spot unseen on account
of the thick foliage of the grove.

'There's something awful in the timing o' that sound, ain't there,
miss?'

'When you say there is, there really seems to be. You said there were
two--what is the other horrid sound?'

'The pumping-engine. That's close by the Old House, and sends water up
the hill and all over the Great House. We shall hear that directly....
There, now hark again.'

From the same direction down the dell they could now hear the whistling
creak of cranks, repeated at intervals of half-a-minute, with a sousing
noise between each: a creak, a souse, then another creak, and so on
continually.

'Now if anybody could make shift to live through the other sounds, these
would finish him off, don't you think so, miss? That machine goes on
night and day, summer and winter, and is hardly ever greased or visited.
Ah, it tries the nerves at night, especially if you are not very well;
though we don't often hear it at the Great House.'

'That sound is certainly very dismal. They might have the wheel greased.
Does Miss Aldclyffe take any interest in these things?'

'Well, scarcely; you see her father doesn't attend to that sort of thing
as he used to. The engine was once quite his hobby. But now he's getten
old and very seldom goes there.'

'How many are there in family?'

'Only her father and herself. He's a' old man of seventy.'

'I had thought that Miss Aldclyffe was sole mistress of the property,
and lived here alone.'

'No, m--' The coachman was continually checking himself thus, being
about to style her miss involuntarily, and then recollecting that he was
only speaking to the new lady's-maid.

'She will soon be mistress, however, I am afraid,' he continued, as if
speaking by a spirit of prophecy denied to ordinary humanity. 'The poor
old gentleman has decayed very fast