e tightly closed, I felt an extreme icy cold in my
teeth. I now got out of bed, thinking this might be a friendly visit
from the ghost of the sick lad upstairs, who must have died.

"As I went to the door, the thing passed before me, rapping on the
walls. When I was got to the door it knocked outside; when I opened
the door, it began to knock on the turret. The moon was shining; I
went on to see what would happen, but it beat on the other sides of
the tower, and, as it always evaded me, I went up to see how my
patient was. He was alive, but very weak.

"As I was speaking to those who stood about his bed, we heard a noise
as if the house was falling. In rushed my bedfellow, the brother of
the sick lad, half dead with terror.

"'When you got up,' he said, 'I felt a cold hand on my back. I
thought it was you who wanted to waken me and take me to see my
brother, so I pretended to be asleep and lay quiet, supposing that you
would go alone when you found me so sound asleep. But when I did not
feel you get up, and the cold hand grew to be more than I could bear,
I hit out to push your hand away, and felt your place empty--but warm.
Then I remembered the follet, and ran upstairs as hard as I could put
my feet to the ground: never was I in such a fright!'

"The sick lad died on the following night."

Here Carden the elder stopped, and Jerome, his son, philosophised on
the subject.

Miss Dendy, on the authority of Mr. Elijah Cope, an itinerant
preacher, gives this anecdote of similar familiarity with a follet in
Staffordshire.

* * * * *

"Fairies! I went into a farmhouse to stay a night, and in the evening
there came a knocking in the room as if some one had struck the table.
I jumped up. My hostess got up and 'Good-night,' says she, 'I'm off'.
'But what was it?' says I. 'Just a poor old fairy,' says she; 'Old
Nancy. She's a poor old thing; been here ever so long; lost her
husband and her children; it's bad to be left like that, all alone. I
leave a bit o' cake on the table for her, and sometimes she fetches
it, and sometimes she don't."

THE BLACK DOG AND THE THUMBLESS HAND

[Some years ago I published in a volume of tales called The Wrong
Paradise, a paper styled "My Friend the Beach-comber". This contained
genuine adventures of a kinsman, my oldest and most intimate friend,
who has passed much of his life in the Pacific, mainly in a foreign
colony, and in the wild New Hebrides. My friend is a man o