fall our mortal lot. For
the mere pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen retainers,
and it is entirely inexpensive. The peculiarity and supernatural worth
of this story lies in the idea of the old wail piercing through the
sweet entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi.
Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a
moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a
ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A
clergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night
reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at
the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and
the hour being somewhat late, she opened it in astonishment, and was
still more astonished to hear him on entering abuse Scripture-reading.
He behaved altogether in an unprecedented manner, and in many ways
terrified the poor girl. Ultimately he knelt before her, and laid his
head on her lap. You can fancy her consternation when glancing down
she discovered that, _instead of hair, the head was covered with the
moss of the moorland_. By a sacred name she adjured him to tell who he
was, and in a moment the figure was gone. It was the Fiend, of
course--diminished sadly since Milton saw him bridge chaos--fallen from
worlds to kitchen-wenches. But just think how in the story, in
half-pity, in half-terror, the popular feeling of homelessness, of
being outcast, of being unsheltered as waste and desert places, has
incarnated itself in that strange covering of the head. It is a true
supernatural touch. One other story I have heard in the misty
Hebrides: A Skye gentleman was riding along an empty moorland road.
All at once, as if it had sprung from the ground, the empty road was
crowded by a funeral procession. Instinctively he drew his horse to a
side to let it pass, which it did without sound of voice, without tread
of foot. Then he knew it was an apparition. Staring on it, he knew
every person who either bore the corpse or walked behind as mourners.
There were the neighbouring proprietors at whose houses he dined, there
were the members of his own kirk-session, there were the men to whom he
was wont to give good-morning when he met them on the road or at
market. Unable to discover his own image in the throng, he was
inwardly marvelling whose funeral it _could_ be, when the troop of
spectres vanished, and the road was empty