delight, and Agnes Anne said that it was "just sweet to watch him."
But even this pleasure palled before the tidings from the Haunted House
as edited and expanded by Jo Kettle.

"Yes, Duncan had told him, and Sandy Webb had told _him_. There were
daylight ghosts abroad about Marnhoul. Everybody on the coach had seen
them----"

"What were they like?" queried Agnes Anne in an awestruck whisper; so
well poised, however, that it only reached Jo's ear, and never caused my
enraptured father to wink an eyelid. I really believe that, like a good
Calvinist with a sound minister tried and proven, my father allowed
himself a little nap by way of refreshment while Fred Esquillant was
construing.

Nothing loath, Jo launched headlong into the grisly. Through the matted
undergrowth of years, over the high-spiked barriers of the deer-park,
the Highflyer had seen not only the familiar Grey Lady in robes of
rustling silk (through which you could discern the gravel and weeds on
the path), but little green demons with chalk-white heads and long ears.
These leaped five-barred gates and pursued the coach and its shrieking
inmates as far as the little Mains brook that passes the kirk door at
the entrance of the village. Then there was a huge, undistinct, crawling
horror, half sea-serpent, half slow-worm, that had looked at them over
the hedge, and, flinging out a sudden loop, had lassoed Peter Chafts,
the running footman, whose duty it was to leap down and clear stones out
of the horses' hoofs. Whether Little Peter had been recovered or not, Jo
Kettle very naturally could not tell. How, indeed, could he? But, with
an apparition like that, it was not at all probable.

Jo was preparing a further instalment, including clanking chains, gongs
that sounded unseen in the air, hands that gripped the passengers and
tried to pull them from their seats--all the wild tales of Souter
Gowans, the village cobbler, and of ne'er-do-well farm lads, idle and
reckless, whose word would never have been taken in any ordinary affair
of life. Jo had not time, however, for Agnes Anne had a strong
imagination, coupled with a highly nervous organization. She laughed out
suddenly, in the middle of a solemn Horatian hush, a wild, hysterical
laugh, which brought my father to his feet, broad awake in a second. The
class gazed open-mouthed, the pale face of Fred Esquillant alone
twitching responsively.

"What have you been saying to Agnes Anne MacAlpine?" demanded my f