shoulder, us I thought — and there was no such
thing.

For all these reasons, and for others less
easily and briefly statable, I find the early
morning to be my most ghostly time. Any
house would be more or less haunted, to me, in
the early morning; and a haunted house could
scarcely address me to greater advantage than
then.

I walked on into the village, with the desertion
of this house upon my mind, and I found the
landlord of the little inn, sanding his door-step.
I bespoke breakfast, and broached the subject
of the house.

"Is it haunted?" I asked.

The landlord looked at me, shook his head,
and answered, "I say nothing."

"Then it is haunted?"

"Well!" cried the landlord, in an outburst of
frankness that had the appearance of desperation—
"I wouldn't sleep in it."

"Why not?"

"If I wanted to have all the bells in a house
ring, with nobody to ring 'em; and all the doors
in a house bang with nobody to bang 'em; and all
sorts of feet treading about with no feet there;
why then," said the landlord, "I'd sleep in that
house."

"Is anything seen there?"

The landlord looked at me again, and then,
with his former appearance of desperation,
called down his stable-yard for "Ikey!"

The call produced a high-shouldered young
fellow, with a round red face, a short crop of
sandy hair, a very broad humorous mouth, a
turned-up nose, and a great sleeved waistcoat of
purple bars with mother-of-pearl buttons, that
seemed to be growing upon him, and to be in a
fair way — if it were not pruned — of covering his
head and overrunning his boots.

"This gentleman wants to know," said the
landlord, "if anything' s seen at the Poplars."

"'Ooded woman with a howl," said Ikey, in
a state of great freshness.

"Do you mean a cry?"

"I mean a bird, sir."

"A hooded woman with an owl. Dear me!
Did you ever see her?"

"I seen the howl."

"Never the woman?"

"Not so plain as the howl, but they always
keeps together."

"Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly
as the owl?"

"Lord bless you, sir! Lots."

"Who?"

"Lord bless you, sir! Lots."

"The general-dealer opposite, for instance,
who is opening his shop?"

"Perkins? Bless you, Perkins wouldn't go
a-nigh the place. No!" observed the young
man, with considerable feeling; "he an't overwise,
an't Perkins, but he an't such a fool as that."

(Here, the landlord murmured his confidence
in Perkins's knowing better.)

"Who is — or who was — the hooded woman
with the owl? Do you know?"

"Well!" said Ikey, holding up his cap with
one hand while he scratched his head with the
other, "they say, in general, that she was
murdered, and the howl he 'ooted the while."

This very concise summary of the facts was
all I could learn, except that a young man, as
hearty and likely a young man as ever I see,
had been took with fits and held down in
'em, after seeing the hooded woman. Also, that
a personage dimly described as "a hold chap, a
sort of a one-eyed tramp, answering to the name
of Joby, unless you challenged him as Greenwood,
and then he said, 'Why not? and even if so, mind
your own business,'" had encountered the hooded
woman, a matter of five or six times. But, I was
not materially assisted by these witnesses:
inasmuch as the first was in California, and the last
was, as Ikey said (and he was confirmed by the
landlord) Anywheres.

Now, although I regard with a hushed and
solemn fear, the mysteries, between which and
this state of existence is interposed the barrier
of the great trial and change that fall on all the
things that live; and although I have not the
audacity to pretend that I know anything of
them; I can no more reconcile the mere banging
of doors, ringing of bells, creaking of boards, and
such-like insignificances, with the majestic beauty
and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that
I am permitted to understand, than I had been
able, a little while before, to yoke the spiritual
intercourse of my fellow-traveller to the chariot of
the rising sun. Moreover, I had lived in two
haunted houses — both abroad. In one of these,
an old Italian palace, which bore the reputation
of being very badly haunted indeed, and
which had recently been twice abandoned on
that account, I lived eight months, most
tranquilly and pleasantly: notwithstanding that
the house had a score of mysterious bedrooms,
which were never used, and possessed, in
one large room in which I sat reading, times out
of number at all hours, and next to which I
slept, a haunted chamber of the first pretensions.
I gently hinted these considerations to the landlord.
And as to this particular house having a
bad name, I reasoned with him, Why, how many
things had bad names undeservedly, and how
easy it was to give bad names, and did he not
think that if he and I were persistently to
whisper in the village that any weird-looking old
drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold
himself to the Devil, he would come in time to
be suspected of that commercial venture! All
this wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the
landlord, I am bound to confess, and was as dead
a failure as ever I made in my life.

To cut this part of the story short, I was
piqued about the haunted house, and was already
half resolved to take it. So, after breakfast, I got
the keys from Perkins's brother-in-law (a whip
and harness-maker, who keeps the Post Office,
and is under submission to a most rigorous wife
of the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel persuasion),
and went up to the house, attended by my
landlord and by Ikey.

Within, I found it, as I had expected,