er him as he gazed, and he lifted his violin to dispel
the strange unpleasant feeling that grew upon him. But at the first long
stroke across the strings, an awful sound arose in the further room; a
sound that made him all but drop the bow, and cling to his violin. It
went on. It was the old, all but forgotten whirr of bobbins, mingled
with the gentle groans of the revolving horizontal wheel, but magnified
in the silence of the place, and the echoing imagination of the boy,
into something preternaturally awful. Yielding for a moment to the
growth of goose-skin, and the insurrection of hair, he recovered himself
by a violent effort, and walked to the door that connected the two
compartments. Was it more or less fearful that the jenny was not going
of itself? that the figure of an old woman sat solemnly turning and
turning the hand-wheel? Not without calling in the jury of his senses,
however, would he yield to the special plea of his imagination, but went
nearer, half expecting to find that the mutch, with its big flapping
borders, glimmering white in the gloom across many a machine, surrounded
the face of a skull. But he was soon satisfied that it was only a blind
woman everybody knew--so old that she had become childish. She had heard
the reports of the factory being haunted, and groping about with her
half-withered brain full of them, had found the garden and the back door
open, and had climbed to the first-floor by a farther stair, well known
to her when she used to work that very machine. She had seated herself
instinctively, according to ancient wont, and had set it in motion once
more.

Yielding to an impulse of experiment, Robert began to play again.
Thereupon her disordered ideas broke out in words. And Robert soon began
to feel that it could hardly be more ghastly to look upon a ghost than
to be taken for one.

'Ay, ay, sir,' said the old woman, in a tone of commiseration, 'it maun
be sair to bide. I dinna wonner 'at ye canna lie still. But what gars ye
gang daunerin' aboot this place? It's no yours ony langer. Ye ken whan
fowk's deid, they tyne the grip (loose hold). Ye suld gang hame to yer
wife. She micht say a word to quaiet yer auld banes, for she's a douce
an' a wice woman--the mistress.'

Then followed a pause. There was a horror about the old woman's voice,
already half dissolved by death, in the desolate place, that almost took
from Robert the power of motion. But his violin sent forth an accidental