after nightfall, because it was their foolish
pleasure to believe that it lay on the haunted side of the house. The
more timorous had seen sights and heard sounds there when all the rest of
the house was quiet; and even the young squires were far from having any
wish to enter these formidable precincts after nightfall without
necessity.

That the library had at one time been a favourite resource of
Rashleigh--that a private door out of one side of it communicated with
the sequestered and remote apartment which he chose for himself, rather
increased than disarmed the terrors which the household had for the
dreaded library of Osbaldistone Hall. His extensive information as to
what passed in the world--his profound knowledge of science of every
kind--a few physical experiments which he occasionally showed off, were,
in a house of so much ignorance and bigotry, esteemed good reasons for
supposing him endowed with powers over the spiritual world. He understood
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; and, therefore, according to the apprehension,
and in the phrase of his brother Wilfred, needed not to care "for ghaist
or bar-ghaist, devil or dobbie." Yea, the servants persisted that they
had heard him hold conversations in the library, when every varsal soul
in the family were gone to bed; and that he spent the night in watching
for bogles, and the morning in sleeping in his bed, when he should have
been heading the hounds like a true Osbaldistone.

All these absurd rumours I had heard in broken hints and imperfect
sentences, from which I was left to draw the inference; and, as easily
may be supposed, I laughed them to scorn. But the extreme solitude to
which this chamber of evil fame was committed every night after curfew
time, was an additional reason why I should not intrude on Miss Vernon
when she chose to sit there in the evening.

To resume what I was saying,--I was not surprised to see a glimmering of
light from the library windows: but I was a little struck when I
distinctly perceived the shadows of two persons pass along and intercept
the light from the first of the windows, throwing the casement for a
moment into shade. "It must be old Martha," thought I, "whom Diana has
engaged to be her companion for the evening; or I must have been
mistaken, and taken Diana's shadow for a second person. No, by Heaven! it
appears on the second window,--two figures distinctly traced; and now it
is lost again--it is seen on the third--on the fo