pigsty into the widow's garden as clean as a boy's kite. When I looked
over the hedge, widow--Tom Lamport's widow that was--was prodding for
her nasturtiums with a daisy grubber. After I had watched her for a
little I went down to the Fox and Grapes to tell landlord what she had
said to me. Landlord he laughed, being a married man and at ease with
the sex. "Come to that," he said, "the tempest has blowed something into
my field. A kind of a ship I think it would be."

I was surprised at that until he explained that it was only a
ghost-ship, and would do no hurt to the turnips. We argued that it had
been blown up from the sea at Portsmouth, and then we talked of
something else. There were two slates down at the parsonage and a big
tree in Lumley's meadow. It was a rare storm.

I reckon the wind had blown our ghosts all over England. They were
coming back for days afterward with foundered horses, and as footsore as
possible, and they were so glad to get back to Fairfield that some of
them walked up the street crying like little children. Squire said that
his great-grandfather's great-grandfather hadn't looked so dead-beat
since the battle of Naseby, and he's an educated man.

What with one thing and another, I should think it was a week before we
got straight again, and then one afternoon I met the landlord on the
green, and he had a worried face. "I wish you'd come and have a look at
that ship in my field," he said to me. "It seems to me it's leaning real
hard on the turnips. I can't bear thinking what the missus will say when
she sees it."

I walked down the lane with him, and, sure enough, there was a ship in
the middle of his field, but such a ship as no man had seen on the water
for three hundred years, let alone in the middle of a turnipfield. It
was all painted black, and covered with carvings, and there was a great
bay-window in the stern, for all the world like the squire's
drawing-room. There was a crowd of little black cannon on deck and
looking out of her port-holes, and she was anchored at each end to the
hard ground. I have seen the wonders of the world on picture-postcards,
but I have never seen anything to equal that.

"She seems very solid for a ghost-ship," I said, seeing that landlord
was bothered.

"I should say it's a betwixt and between," he answered, puzzling it
over; "but it's going to spoil a matter of fifty turnips, and missus
she'll want it moved." We went up to her and touched the side,