reach,
and 'tween you and me, she says a man with a white dress on led her
back, and she found her mother dead on the floor. O! we're havin' on't
dreadful now days; spirits walking the airth, never no good comes of
sich things."

The murder and the reputed ghost, whom several of the inhabitants
testified to having seen at the midnight hour, was the absorbing topic
of conversation in the immediate neighborhood where the tragedy was
enacted.

For several days succeeding the affair Hank Glutter's saloon was the
general rendezvous of the wonder-loving country people round about.
All appeared to enjoy the tippling vastly more than Hank himself.

It was not the thought of the needy wife sighing for the hard earned
shilling, with which to provide for the many little forms that must go
half clad, and the little feet uncovered during the approaching
winter, for want of those bits of metal ringing out so sadly as they
fell into his drawer, that clouded his unusually complacent smile;
neither was it the remembrance of the cruel part he had acted in
Little Wolf's abduction that shook his sin-stained soul. He affected
to discredit the appearance of the much-talked-of apparition, and yet
he was continually tormented with a vague dread of a second visit from
his ghost-ship, which he would have pursuaded himself was entirely a
creature of the imagination, had not his missing fourth proof brandy
bottle proved the contrary.

He had resolved not to mention the occurrence that had so strangely
disturbed him, but, being one day alone with Edward, who had called
particularly to make one of a company who were going out the day
following to renew the search for Little Wolf, he ventured to
communicate his secret to him.

"Why, Mr. Glutter, why didn't you tell me before?" said Edward smiling
in spite of the sad errand that had brought him there, "all this time
you have needlessly tormented yourself."

"How so, Mr. Sherman?"

"Why, Dr. DeWolf swallows a portion of that fourth proof every day. I
have no doubt it was he who paid you the visit. I am certain that he
knows something about the murder of Mrs. Green, and he must have been
the man in white that little Fanny talks about. I see it all clearly
now; Dr. DeWolf is the ghost, and he has kept his bed to prevent
suspicion."

"I was confident," said Hank with a look of infinite relief, "that the
Dr. would have his dram, spite of our machinations. I have known
several such cases of appa