Then the landlord, standing back to the fireplace with legs astride, would say with the authority of one in his own house, “It’s no good you chaps think’n you’re goin’ against the gentry. They’ve got the land and they’ve got the money, an’ they’ll keep it. Where’d you be without them to give you work an’ pay your wages, I’d like to know?” and this, as yet, unanswerable question would cast a chill over the company until some one conjured it away with the name of Gladstone. Gladstone! The Grand Old Man! The People’s William! Their faith in his power was touching, and all voices would join in singing:

God bless the people’s William,

Long may he lead the van

Of Liberty and Freedom,

God bless the Grand Old Man.

But the children, listening, without and within, liked better the evenings of tale-telling; when, with curdling blood and creeping spine, they would hear about the turnpike ghost, which, only a mile away from the spot where they stood, had been seen in the form of a lighted lantern, bobbing up and down in the path of a solitary wayfarer, the bearer, if any, invisible. And the man in a neighbouring village who, on his six-mile walk in the dark to fetch medicine for his sick wife, met a huge black dog with eyes of fire—the devil, evidently. Or perhaps the talk would turn to the old sheep-stealing days and the ghost which was said still to haunt the spot where the gibbet had stood; or the lady dressed in white and riding a white horse, but minus her head, who, every night as the clock struck twelve, rode over a bridge on the way to the market town.

One cold winter night, as this tale was being told, the doctor, an old man of eighty, who still attended the sick in the villages for miles around, stopped his dogcart at the inn gate and came in for hot brandy and water.

“You, sir, now,” said one of the men. “You’ve been over Lady Bridge at midnight many’s the time, I’ll warrant. Can you say as you’ve ever seen anything?”

The doctor shook his head. “No,” he replied, “I can’t say that I have. But,” and he paused to weigh his words, “well, it’s rather a curious thing. During the fifty years I’ve been amongst you I’ve had many horses, as you know, and not one of them have I got over that bridge at night without urging. Whether they can see more than we can see, of course, I don’t know; but there it is for what it is worth. Good night, men.”