as soft-headed as he went, and
try as we might, we couldn't get anything reasonable out of him. He
talked a lot of gibberish about keelhauling and walking the plank and
crimson murders--things which a decent sailor should know nothing about,
so that it seemed to me that for all his manners captain had been more
of a pirate than a gentleman mariner. But to draw sense out of that boy
was as hard as picking cherries off a crab-tree. One silly tale he had
that he kept on drifting back to, and to hear him you would have thought
that it was the only thing that happened to him in his life.

"We was at anchor," he would say, "off an island called the Basket of
Flowers, and the sailors had caught a lot of parrots and we were
teaching them to swear. Up and down the decks, up and down the decks,
and the language they used was dreadful. Then we looked up and saw the
masts of the Spanish ship outside the harbor. Outside the harbor they
were, so we threw the parrots into the sea, and sailed out to fight. And
all the parrots were drowneded in the sea, and the language they used
was dreadful."

That's the sort of boy he was--nothing but silly talk of parrots when we
asked him about the fighting. And we never had a chance of teaching him
better, for two days after he ran away again, and hasn't been seen
since.

That's my story, and I assure you that things like that are happening at
Fairfield all the time. The ship has never come back, but somehow, as
people grow older, they seem to think that one of these windy nights
she'll come sailing in over the hedges with all the lost ghosts on
board. Well, when she comes, she'll be welcome. There's one ghost lass
that has never grown tired of waiting for her lad to return. Every night
you'll see her out on the green, straining her poor eyes with looking
for the mast-lights among the stars. A faithful lass you'd call her, and
I'm thinking you'd be right.

Landlord's field wasn't a penny the worse for the visit; but they do say
that since then the turnips that have been grown in it have tasted of
rum.

THE TRANSPLANTED GHOST

A CHRISTMAS STORY

BY WALLACE IRWIN

From _Everybody's Magazine_. By permission of _Everybody's_ and Wallace
Irwin.

The Transplanted Ghost

A CHRISTMAS STORY

BY WALLACE IRWIN

When Aunt Elizabeth asked me to spend Christmas with her at Seven Oaks
she appended a peculiar request to her letter. "Like a good fellow," she
wrote, "won't you drop