roughout the aeons, they who having no end, could have no
beginning? Not those of this world only, we may be sure. It is so small
and there are so many others, millions upon millions of them, and such
an infinite variety of knowledge is needed to shape the soul of man,
even though it remain as yet imperfect and but a shadow of what it
shall be.

Godfrey Knight was born the first, six months later she followed (her
name was Isobel Blake), as though to search for him, or because whither
he went, thither she must come, that being her doom and his.

Their circumstances, or rather those of their parents, were very
different but, as it chanced, the houses in which they dwelt stood
scarcely three hundred yards apart.

Between the rivers Blackwater and Crouch in Essex, is a great stretch
of land, flat for the most part and rather dreary, which, however, to
judge from what they have left us, our ancestors thought of much
importance because of its situation, its trade and the corn it grew. So
it came about that they built great houses there and reared beautiful
abbeys and churches for the welfare of their souls. Amongst these, not
very far from the coast, is that of Monk's Acre, still a beautiful fane
though they be but few that worship there to-day. The old Abbey house
adjacent is now the rectory. It has been greatly altered, and the
outbuildings are shut up or used as granaries and so forth by
arrangement with a neighbouring farmer. Still its grey walls contain
some fine but rather unfurnished chambers, reputed by the vulgar to be
haunted. It was for this reason, so says tradition, that the son of the
original grantee of Monk's Acre Abbey, who bought it for a small sum
from Henry VIII at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, turned the Abbey
house into a rectory and went himself to dwell in another known as
Hawk's Hall, situate on the bank of the little stream of that name,
Hawk's Creek it is called, which finds its way to the Blackwater.

Parsons, he said, were better fitted to deal with ghosts than laymen,
especially if the said laymen had dispossessed the originals of the
ghosts of their earthly heritage.

The ancient Hawk's Hall, a timber building of the sort common in Essex
as some of its premises still show, has long since disappeared. About
the beginning of the Victorian era a fish-merchant of the name of
Brown, erected on its site a commodious, comfortable, but particularly
hideous mansion of white brick, where he dw