arriage
was at the abbey door, and a man easily lifted the box into it. The
owner having taken his seat, the coachman attempted to start his horses,
but in vain. They would not--they could not move. More horses were
brought, and then the heavy farm-horses, and eventually all the oxen.
They were powerless to start the carriage. At length a mysterious voice
was heard, declaring that the box could never be moved from Buckland
Abbey. It was taken from the carriage easily by one man, and a pair of
horses galloped off with the carriage.

XIII

THE SPECTRE BRIDEGROOM

By WILLIAM HUNT

Long, long ago a farmer named Lenine lived in Boscean. He had but one
son, Frank Lenine, who was indulged into waywardness by both his
parents. In addition to the farm servants, there was one, a young girl,
Nancy Trenoweth, who especially assisted Mrs Lenine in all the various
duties of a small farmhouse.

Nancy Trenoweth was very pretty, and although perfectly uneducated, in
the sense in which we now employ the term education, she possessed many
native graces, and she had acquired much knowledge, really useful to one
whose aspirations would probably never rise higher than to be mistress
of a farm of a few acres. Educated by parents who had certainly never
seen the world beyond Penzance, her ideas of the world were limited to a
few miles around the Land's-End. But although her book of nature was a
small one, it had deeply impressed her mind with its influences. The
wild waste, the small but fertile valley, the rugged hills, with their
crowns of cairns, the moors rich in the golden furze and the purple
heath, the sea-beaten cliffs and the silver sands, were the pages she
had studied, under the guidance of a mother who conceived, in the
sublimity of her ignorance, that everything in nature was the home of
some spirit form. The soul of the girl was imbued with the deeply
religious dye of her mother's mind, whose religion was only a sense of
an unknown world immediately beyond our own. The elder Nancy Trenoweth
exerted over the villagers around her considerable power. They did not
exactly fear her. She was too free from evil for that; but they were
conscious of a mental superiority, and yielded without complaining to
her sway.

The result of this was, that the younger Nancy, although compelled to
service, always exhibited some pride, from a feeling that her mother was
a superior woman to any around her.

She never felt herself infer