partial
recompense for the epitaph hunter.

"This is the Ticking Stone," said my companion, pointing to a
recumbent slab, worn smooth and scarcely showing a trace of former
lettering; "put your ear upon it while I pull away the weeds, and then
note if you hear any thing."

I laid my ear upon the mossy stone, and almost immediately felt an
audible, almost tangible ticking, like that of a lady's watch.

"You are scratching the stone, Pusey," I cried to my informant.

"No! Upon my honor! That is not the sound of a scratch that you hear.
It cannot be any insect nor any process of moving life in the stone or
beneath it. Can you liken it to any thing but the equal motion of a
rather feeble timepiece?"

I listened again, and this time longer, and a sort of superstition
grew over me, so that had I been alone, probably I would have
experienced a sense of timid loneliness. To stand amidst those silent
memorial stones of the early times and hear a watch beat beneath one
of them as perfectly as you can feel it in your vest pocket, and then
to feel your heart start nervously at the recognition of this
disassociated sound, is not satisfying, even when in human company.

"This is the best ghost I have ever found," I said. "Perhaps some one
has slipped a watch underneath, for it is somebody's watch; there _is_
something real in it."

"I took the stone up once myself," said Pusey, "and the ticking then
seemed to come up from the ground. While I deliberated, an old man
came out of yonder old sexton-looking house, and warned me not to
disturb the dead. He crossed the wall, and assisted me to replace the
stone, and then bade me sit down upon it, ancient mariner-like, while
he disclosed the cause of the phenomenon."

Here my companion stopped a minute--and in the pause we could hear the
old trees wave very solemnly above us, and a nut, or burr, or sycamore
ball, came rattling down the old kirk roof as we stood there in the
graves, to startle us the more, and then he said:

"It is just as queer as the tale he told me--the disappearance of that
old man. Nobody about here can recognize him from my descriptions. He
walked toward the old mill down the Newark road, and the next time I
looked up he was gone. The people in the house there think I am
flighty in my mind for insisting upon his appearance to me at all."

"Go on with the tale right here, my flesh-creeping friend," I said.
"It will do us good to feel occasionally solemn."