decay, what drop in the social ocean shall be
free!

THE GHOST OF A LOVE STORY.

In an excursion I once made in Brittany, I
arrived one evening at the little town of
Pontaven in Lower Cornwall—for Cornwall is
on both sides of the channel—with all its
Tors, Tres, and Pens, as well on the French as
on the English land, which goes far to prove
that the two countries of Great and Little
Britain were once united.

It was a beautiful summer, and the charming
country in that point of projecting land
between the Bay of Douarnenez and the inlet
of Benodet, had never looked more smiling
and agreeable. I was on my way to Quimper,
the capital of the district, and need not have
ventured on such fare as the very shabby inn
offered; but I had a fancy to stop in order to
have an opportunity of visiting the ruins of a
castle which I had observed on my way,
crowning a hill rising above a village called
Nizon, a short walk from Pontaven.

As I was well aware that to view a ruin
aright, one should " go visit it by the pale
moonlight," and the moon being then "in her
highest noon," I meditated an excursion with
my companions—one of whom was a Breton
born, and the other a brisk little native of
Normandy—to the Castle of Rustéfan, as soon
as our supper had a little restored us after a
day's journey over bad roads.

The walk was extremely pretty through
deep shaded lanes, across which the clear
rays of the moonlight danced as they escaped
through the leaves, stirred by a soft breeze.
We soon reached the village, and mounted
the steep hill, at the highest point of which
rose the numerous walls and towers of what
must once have been a large castle. In what
had been the inner court the ground was
covered with soft turf; where, formerly, the
village fetes and dances were held.

One night, a merry party of young people
were dancing on this green, and had not yet
ceased, when the clock of the chapel of Nizon
tolled twelve. Exactly at that moment,
although the weather had been beautiful
until then, for it was a warm summer, a
sudden chill came over all, the moon became
obscured, and the wind rose in sharp gusts
which violently shook the thick ivy
garlands on the wall. The party stopped in
the midst of their dance, for every one had
felt the influence of the change, and, as the
sky grew darker and the wind louder, they
clung to each other in actual fear. Presently
those who had courage to look round them
were aware that, gazing at them from the
pointed ruined window of the donjon, stood a
figure in the dress of a monk with a shaven
crown and hollow lustrous eyes. As the
Great Revolution had long since cleared the
country of monasteries, and as no monk had
ever been seen in the locality except in a
picture, the general astonishment was great.
The terror increased when the figure, slowly
moving from the window, reappeared at
a lower one, as if descending the broken
stair, and finally was seen to emerge from
beneath the stone portal into the interrupted
moonlight, and appeared—still fixing his
lustrous eyes upon them—to be advancing.
With a general cry of terror, and with a
rapidity which only fear could give, all
rushed towards the opposite entrance, and,
nearly falling over each other in their
eagerness to escape, darted from the castle and
made the best of their way to the bottom of
the hill, nor stopped until they had regained
the cottages.

After this, the ruins were never visited
by night; but occasionally it happened that
a stranger, coming from a distance, would
have to cross the lower part of the hill,
which the castle crowned, and, if he looked
up from the marshy lake into which drains
all the water from the heights round about,
and which is one of the most dismal, dreary-
looking spots in the neighbourhood, he was
sure to see, mounting the hill and advancing
slowly to the chief entrance to the castle, a
funeral procession conducting a bier covered
with a white cloth, and having four tapers at
the corners, just as is usual on the coffin of a
young girl. This would enter the castle gate
and disappear.

Others have heard, as they passed under
the walls, the sound of weeping and lamenting,
and sometimes of a low melancholy
singing, and have been witnesses to the
appearance on the walls of a female figure,
as of a very young girl, dressed in a robe of
green satin strewn with golden flowers, who
walks mournfully along uttering sighs and
sobs, and occasionally singing in a tearful
voice, words which no one has been able to
comprehend.

My Breton friend, to whom all the legends
of his country were familiar, finding that I
was interested in the account of these
apparitions of the castle, thus satisfied my longing
to know how the belief could have arisen of
these appearances of monk and lady.

"I suppose it was to give a gloomier
horror to the legend that our friends the
peasants of Nizon fixed upon a monk for
their ghost. The fact is, it is a priest who
appears, with shaven head and brilliant
eyes; one of those whom you may meet
any day in the parish; indeed, the real
hero of the tale filled that very office. You
may have observed two names frequently
repeated over the shops, both in the village
below and at Pontaven—both Naour and
Flécher are common hereabouts; the first
are extremely proud of their name, for it
proves them to be descendants of the once
powerful lord of the castle of Rustéfan, in
days when lords were people who had the
command of all the country and all the