allowed to enter from the north?

The credulous are wrong, no doubt; but it is clear that the common-sense
thinkers have not discovered the key to the mystery. The problem remains
still unsolved.

It is certain that the house is generally believed to have been more
useful than inconvenient to the smugglers.

The growth of superstitious terror tends to deprive facts of their true
proportions. Without doubt, many of the nocturnal phenomena which have,
by little and little, secured to the building the reputation of being
haunted, might be explained by obscure and furtive visits, by brief
sojourns of sailors near the spot, and sometimes by the precaution,
sometimes by the daring, of men engaged in certain suspicious
occupations concealing themselves for their dark purposes, or allowing
themselves to be seen in order to inspire dread.

At this period, already a remote one, many daring deeds were possible.
The police--particularly in small places--was by no means as efficient
as in these days.

Add to this, that if the house was really, as was said, a resort of the
smugglers, their meetings there must, up to a certain point, have been
safe from interruptions precisely because the house was dreaded by the
superstitious people of the country. Its ghostly reputation prevented
its being visited for other reasons. People do not generally apply to
the police, or officers of customs, on the subject of spectres. The
superstitious rely on making the sign of the cross; not on magistrates
and indictments. There is always a tacit connivance, involuntary it may
be, but not the less real, between the objects which inspire fear and
their victims. The terror-stricken feel a sort of culpability in having
encountered their terrors; they imagine themselves to have unveiled a
secret; and they have an inward fear, unknown even to themselves, of
aggravating their guilt, and exciting the anger of the apparitions. All
this makes them discreet. And over and above this reason, the very
instinct of the credulous is silence; dread is akin to dumbness; the
terrified speak little; horror seems always to whisper, "Hush!"

It must be remembered that this was a period when the Guernsey peasants
believed that the Mystery of the Holy Manger is repeated by oxen and
asses every year on a fixed day; a period when no one would have dared
to enter a stable at night for fear of coming upon the animals on their
knees.

If the local legends and stories of th