"Ghost! What ghost?"

"Oh, the village ghost," she said quietly, coming closer to my chair
with a little nervous movement of genuine alarm, and adding in a lower
voice, "He comes before a death, they say!"

It was not difficult to induce the girl to talk, and the story she told
me, shorn of the superstition that had obviously gathered with the years
round the memory of a strangely picturesque figure, was an interesting
and peculiar one.

The inn, she said, was originally a farmhouse, occupied by a yeoman
farmer, evidently of a superior, if rather eccentric, character, who had
been very poor until he reached old age, when a son died suddenly in
the Colonies and left him an unexpected amount of money, almost a
fortune.

The old man thereupon altered no whit his simple manner of living, but
devoted his income entirely to the improvement of the village and to the
assistance of its inhabitants; he did this quite regardless of his
personal likes and dislikes, as if one and all were absolutely alike to
him, objects of a genuine and impersonal benevolence. People had always
been a little afraid of the man, not understanding his eccentricities,
but the simple force of this love for humanity changed all that in a
very short space of time; and before he died he came to be known as the
Father of the Village and was held in great love and veneration by all.

A short time before his end, however, he began to act queerly. He spent
his money just as usefully and wisely, but the shock of sudden wealth