urate
description of the great veiled figures the woman declared she had seen
moving among the trees where her husband stood. The innocent pine-grove
now became positively haunted, and the title of "Wood of the Dead" clung
naturally as if it had been applied to it in the ordinary course of
events by the compilers of the Ordnance Survey.

On the evening of his ninetieth birthday the old man went up to his wife
and kissed her. His manner was loving, and very gentle, and there was
something about him besides, she declared afterwards, that made her
slightly in awe of him and feel that he was almost more of a spirit than
a man.

He kissed her tenderly on both cheeks, but his eyes seemed to look
right through her as he spoke.

"Dearest wife," he said, "I am saying good-bye to you, for I am now
going into the Wood of the Dead, and I shall not return. Do not follow
me, or send to search, but be ready soon to come upon the same journey
yourself."

The good woman burst into tears and tried to hold him, but he easily
slipped from her hands, and she was afraid to follow him. Slowly she saw
him cross the field in the sunshine, and then enter the cool shadows of
the grove, where he disappeared from her sight.

That same night, much later, she woke to find him lying peacefully by
her side in bed, with one arm stretched out towards her, _dead_. Her
story was half believed, half doubted at the time, but in a very few
years afterwards it evidently came to be accepted by all the
countryside. A funeral service was held to which the people flocked in
great numbers, and everyone approved of the sentiment which led the
widow to add the words, "The Father of the Village," after the usual
texts which appeared upon the stone over his grave.

This, then, was the story I pieced together of the village ghost as the
little inn-keeper's daughter told it to me that afternoon in the
parlour of the inn.

"But you're not the first to say you've seen him," the girl concluded;
"and your description is just what we've always heard, and that window,
they say, was just where he used to sit and think, and think, when he
was alive, and sometimes, they say, to cry for hours together."

"And would you feel afraid if you had seen him?" I asked, for the girl
seemed strangely moved and interested in the whole story.

"I think so," she answered timidly. "Surely, if he spoke to me. He did
speak to _you_, didn't he, sir?" she asked after a slight pause.

"