e of the
inn and the church and the green, I suppose. At all events, we never
feel comfortable out of Fairfield.

Of course the cockneys, with their vasty houses and noise-ridden
streets, can call us rustics if they choose; but for all that, Fairfield
is a better place to live in than London. Doctor says that when he goes
to London his mind is bruised with the weight of the houses, and he was
a cockney born. He had to live there himself when he was a little chap,
but he knows better now. You gentlemen may laugh--perhaps some of you
come from London-way, but it seems to me that a witness like that is
worth a gallon of arguments.

Dull? Well, you might find it dull, but I assure you that I've listened
to all the London yarns you have spun to-night, and they're absolutely
nothing to the things that happen at Fairfield. It's because of our way
of thinking, and minding our own business. If one of your Londoners was
set down on the green of a Saturday night when the ghosts of the lads
who died in the war keep tryst with the lasses who lie in the
churchyard, he couldn't help being curious and interfering, and then the
ghosts would go somewhere where it was quieter. But we just let them
come and go and don't make any fuss, and in consequence Fairfield is the
ghostiest place in all England. Why, I've seen a headless man sitting on
the edge of the well in broad daylight, and the children playing about
his feet as if he were their father. Take my word for it, spirits know
when they are well off as much as human beings.

Still, I must admit that the thing I'm going to tell you about was queer
even for our part of the world, where three packs of ghost-hounds hunt
regularly during the season, and blacksmith's great-grandfather is busy
all night shoeing the dead gentlemen's horses. Now that's a thing that
wouldn't happen in London, because of their interfering ways; but
blacksmith he lies up aloft and sleeps as quiet as a lamb. Once when he
had a bad head he shouted down to them not to make so much noise, and
in the morning he found an old guinea left on the anvil as an apology.
He wears it on his watch-chain now. But I must get on with my story; if
I start telling you about the queer happenings at Fairfield, I'll never
stop.

It all came of the great storm in the spring of '97, the year that we
had two great storms. This was the first one, and I remember it well,
because I found in the morning that it had lifted the thatch of my