s moored below.
Two minutes later he had pushed off and was rowing it quietly
homewards.

There is no more to say, except that the woman recovered. She had
fainted, I suppose, as they pulled her out. Anyhow, These-an'-That
restored her to life--and she ran away the very next week with the
gamekeeper.

III--"DOUBLES" AND QUITS.

Here is a story from Troy, containing two ghosts and a moral.
I found it, only last week, in front of a hump-backed cottage that
the masons are pulling down to make room for the new Bank.
Simon Hancock, the outgoing tenant, had fetched an empty cider-cask,
and set it down on the opposite side of the road; and from this
Spartan seat watched the work of demolition for three days, without
exhaustion and without emotion. In the interval between two
avalanches of dusty masonry, he spoke to this effect:--

Once upon a time the cottage was inhabited by a man and his wife.
The man was noticeable for the extreme length of his upper lip and
gloom of his religious opinions. He had been a mate in the coasting
trade, but settled down, soon after his marriage, and earned his
living as one of the four pilots in the port. The woman was
unlovely, with a hard eye and a temper as stubborn as one of St.
Nicholas's horns. How she had picked up with a man was a mystery,
until you looked at _him_.

After six years of wedlock they quarrelled one day, about nothing at
all: at least, Simon Hancock, though unable to state the exact cause
of strife, felt himself ready to swear it was nothing more serious
than the cooking of the day's dinner. From that date, however, the
pair lived in the house together and never spoke. The man happened
to be of the home-keeping sort--possessed no friends and never put
foot inside a public-house. Through the long evenings he would sit
beside his own fender, with his wife facing him, and never a word
flung across the space between them, only now and then a look of cold
hate. The few that saw them thus said it was like looking on a pair
of ugly statues. And this lasted for four years.

Of course the matter came to their minister's ears--he was a
"Brianite"--and the minister spoke to them after prayer-meeting, one
Wednesday night, and called at the cottage early next morning, to
reconcile them. He stayed fifteen minutes and came away, down the
street, with a look on his face such as Moses might have worn on his
way down from Mount Sinai, if only Moses had seen the d