said to me.

"You mean Joshua, the quiet lad," I answered, knowing him well.

"Quiet!" said shoemaker indignantly. "Quiet you call him, coming home
at three o'clock every morning as drunk as a magistrate and waking up
the whole house with his noise."

"Why, it can't be Joshua!" I said, for I knew him for one of the most
respectable young ghosts in the village.

"Joshua it is," said shoemaker; "and one of these nights he'll find
himself out in the street if he isn't careful."

This kind of talk shocked me, I can tell you, for I don't like to
hear a man abusing his own family, and I could hardly believe that a
steady youngster like Joshua had taken to drink. But just then in
came butcher Aylwin in such a temper that he could hardly drink his
beer. "The young puppy! the young puppy!" he kept on saying; and it
was some time before shoemaker and I found out that he was talking
about his ancestor that fell at Senlac.

"Drink?" said shoemaker hopefully, for we all like company in our
misfortunes, and butcher nodded grimly.

"The young noodle," he said, emptying his tankard.

Well, after that I kept my ears open, and it was the same story all
over the village. There was hardly a young man among all the ghosts
of Fairfield who didn't roll home in the small hours of the morning
the worse for liquor. I used to wake up in the night and hear them
stumble past my house, singing outrageous songs. The worst of it was
that we couldn't keep the scandal to ourselves and the folk at
Greenhill began to talk of "sodden Fairfield" and taught their
children to sing a song about us:

"Sodden Fairfield, sodden Fairfield, has no use for bread-and-butter,
Rum for breakfast, rum for dinner, rum for tea, and rum for supper!"

We are easy-going in our village, but we didn't like that.

Of course we soon found out where the young fellows went to get the
drink, and landlord was terribly cut up that his tenant should have
turned out so badly, but his wife wouldn't hear of parting with the
brooch, so that he couldn't give the Captain notice to quit. But as
time went on, things grew from bad to worse, and at all hours of the
day you would see those young reprobates sleeping it off on the
village green. Nearly every afternoon a ghost-wagon used to jolt down
to the ship with a lading of rum, and though the older ghosts seemed
inclined to give the Captain's hospitality the go-by, the youngsters
were neither to hold nor to bind.

So one afte