e advancing towards me.

To superstitious minds, therefore, predisposed by the strange and
melancholy stories that are connected with family paintings, it needs
but little stretch of fancy, on a moonlight night, or by the
flickering light of a candle, to set the old pictures on the walls in
motion, sweeping in their robes and trains about the galleries.

To tell the truth, the Squire confesses that he used to take a
pleasure in his younger days in setting marvellous stories afloat, and
connecting them with the lonely and peculiar places of the
neighbourhood. Whenever he read any legend of a striking nature, he
endeavoured to transplant it, and give it a local habitation among the
scenes of his boyhood. Many of these stories took root, and he says he
is often amused with the odd shapes in which they will come back to
him in some old woman's narrative, after they have been circulating
for years among the peasantry, and undergoing rustic additions and
amendments. Among these may doubtless be numbered that of the
crusader's ghost, which I have mentioned in the account of my
Christmas visit; and another about the hard-riding Squire of yore; the
family Nimrod; who is sometimes heard in stormy winter nights,
galloping, with hound and horn, over a wild moor a few miles distant
from the Hall. This I apprehend to have had its origin in the famous
story of the wild huntsman, the favourite goblin in German tales;
though, by-the-by, as I was talking on the subject with Master Simon
the other evening in the dark avenue, he hinted that he had himself
once or twice heard odd sounds at night, very like a pack of hounds in
cry; and that once, as he was returning rather late from a hunting
dinner, he had seen a strange figure galloping along this same moor;
but as he was riding rather fast at the time, and in a hurry to get
home, he did not stop to ascertain what it was.

Popular superstitions are fast fading away in England, owing to the
general diffusion of knowledge, and the bustling intercourse kept up
throughout the country; still they have their strong-holds and
lingering places, and a retired neighbourhood like this is apt to be
one of them. The parson tells me that he meets with many traditional
beliefs and notions among the common people, which he has been able to
draw from them in the course of familiar conversation, though they are
rather shy of avowing them to strangers, and particularly to "the
gentry," who are apt to laug