taken place, forms a very appropriate and telling background to the tale. We have had the Tales of my Landlord. Who will give us the Tales of an Ostler? These, judging from my own selection, might, with a little necessary weeding, prove interesting and, in certain cases, even sensational reading.
I well remember, some few years back, when touring in Yorkshire, the aged ostler of a solitary inn on the moors, where we were weather-bound for a time, related to me, by way of pleasantly passing the time, a blood-curdling story about the house in the "good old times." I must say that the story suited well the building, for it was a bleak, inhospitable-looking house, with long untenanted, unfurnished chambers, its stables going to decay, and mostly given over to cobwebs and half-starved mice—the whole place looking doubly dreary in the dripping rain: a gray drooping sky and a soughing wind serving only too successfully to accentuate its dismalness. "Ah," exclaimed the ostler as we stood together sheltering from the steady downpour in a corner of the stables, "there were queer doings in the old place. I've heard tell, in past times, many a belated traveller who put up here for the night never got no further if he were supposed to have much money upon him; that is, for the landlord then, they do say, combined inn-keeping with robbery. There were one bedroom in the house where they used to put likely travellers to sleep, and this had a secret door to it. It's yon room with the low window overlooking the yard, and, well, next morning the traveller had disappeared no one knew
