disassociated sound, is not satisfying, even when in human company.

"This is the best ghost I have ever found," I said. "Perhaps some one
has slipped a watch underneath, for it is somebody's watch; there _is_
something real in it."

"I took the stone up once myself," said Pusey, "and the ticking then
seemed to come up from the ground. While I deliberated, an old man
came out of yonder old sexton-looking house, and warned me not to
disturb the dead. He crossed the wall, and assisted me to replace the
stone, and then bade me sit down upon it, ancient mariner-like, while
he disclosed the cause of the phenomenon."

Here my companion stopped a minute--and in the pause we could hear the
old trees wave very solemnly above us, and a nut, or burr, or sycamore
ball, came rattling down the old kirk roof as we stood there in the
graves, to startle us the more, and then he said:

"It is just as queer as the tale he told me--the disappearance of that
old man. Nobody about here can recognize him from my descriptions. He
walked toward the old mill down the Newark road, and the next time I
looked up he was gone. The people in the house there think I am
flighty in my mind for insisting upon his appearance to me at all."

"Go on with the tale right here, my flesh-creeping friend," I said.
"It will do us good to feel occasionally solemn."

* * * * *

"This stone, young man," said my Quakerly rebuker, in a hard country