ed the iron
gate of the churchyard. I saw the church door open; the sexton was
replacing his pick, shovel, and spade, with which he had just been
digging a grave in the churchyard, in their little repository under the
stone stair of the tower. He was a polite, shrewd little hunchback, who
was very happy to show me over the church. Among the monuments was one
that interested me; it was erected to commemorate the very Squire Bowes
from whom my two old maids had inherited the house and estate of
Barwyke. It spoke of him in terms of grandiloquent eulogy, and informed
the Christian reader that he had died, in the bosom of the Church of
England, at the age of seventy-one.

I read this inscription by the parting beams of the setting sun, which
disappeared behind the horizon just as we passed out from under the
porch.

"Twenty years since the Squire died," said I, reflecting, as I loitered
still in the churchyard.

"Ay, sir; 'twill be twenty year the ninth o' last month."

"And a very good old gentleman?"

"Good-natured enough, and an easy gentleman he was, sir; I don't think
while he lived he ever hurt a fly," acquiesced Tom Wyndsour. "It ain't
always easy sayin' what's in 'em, though, and what they may take or turn
to afterward; and some o' them sort, I think, goes mad."

"You don't think he was out of his mind?" I asked.

"He? La! no; not he, sir; a bit lazy, mayhap, like other old fellows;
but a knew devilish well what he was about."

Tom Wyndsour's account was a little enigmatical; but, like old Squire
Bowes, I was "a bit lazy" that evening, and asked no more questions
about him.

We got over the stile upon the narrow road that skirts the churchyard.
It is overhung by elms more than a hundred years old, and in the
twilight, which now prevailed, was growing very dark. As side-by-side we
walked along this road, hemmed in by two loose stone-like walls,
something running toward us in a zig-zag line passed us at a wild pace,
with a sound like a frightened laugh or a shudder, and I saw, as it
passed, that it was a human figure. I may confess, now, that I was a
little startled. The dress of this figure was, in part, white: I know I
mistook it at first for a white horse coming down the road at a gallop.
Tom Wyndsour turned about and looked after the retreating figure.

"He'll be on his travels to-night," he said, in a low tone. "Easy served
with a bed, _that_ lad be; six foot o' dry peat or heath, or a nook in a
dry d