r own business. If one
of your Londoners were set down on the green of a Saturday night when
the ghosts of the lads who died in the war keep tryst with the lasses
who lie in the church-yard, he couldn't help being curious and
interfering, and then the ghosts would go somewhere where it was
quieter. But we just let them come and go and don't make any fuss,
and in consequence Fairfield is the ghostiest place in all England.
Why, I've seen a headless man sitting on the edge of the well in
broad daylight, and the children playing about his feet as if he were
their father. Take my word for it, spirits know when they are well
off as much as human beings.

Still, I must admit that the thing I'm going to tell you about was
queer even for our part of the world, where three packs of
ghost-hounds hunt regularly during the season, and blacksmith's
great-grandfather is busy all night shoeing the dead gentlemen's
horses. Now that's a thing that wouldn't happen in London, because of
their interfering ways, but blacksmith he lies up aloft and sleeps as
quiet as a lamb. Once when he had a bad head he shouted down to them
not to make so much noise, and in the morning he found an old guinea
left on the anvil as an apology. He wears it on his watch-chain now.
But I must get on with my story; if I start telling you about the
queer happenings at Fairfield I'll never stop.

It all came of the great storm in the spring of '97, the year that we
had two great storms. This was the first one, and I remember it very
well, because I found in the morning that it had lifted the thatch of
my pigsty into the widow's garden as clean as a boy's kite. When I
looked over the hedge, widow--Tom Lamport's widow that was--was
prodding for her nasturtiums with a daisy-grubber. After I had
watched her for a little I went down to the "Fox and Grapes" to tell
landlord what she had said to me. Landlord he laughed, being a
married man and at ease with the sex. "Come to that," he said, "the
tempest has blowed something into my field. A kind of a ship I
think it would be."

I was surprised at that until he explained that it was only a
ghost-ship and would do no hurt to the turnips. We argued that
it had been blown up from the sea at Portsmouth, and then we
talked of something else. There were two slates down at the
parsonage and a big tree in Lumley's meadow. It was a rare
storm.

I reckon the wind had blown our ghosts all over England.
They were coming back for