Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/184

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
132
DEVONSHIRE CHARACTERS

after it had been repainted and furnished, my daughter rushed to my room one morning exclaiming, 'Mother—you have after all taken the Ghost-dream House’ and so it was in every particular, and I had chosen the very room for mine and arranged to place my bed in the very position I had determined on in my dream.

"At last the move was made, I feeling sure that the Grey Nurse and Little Child were part and parcel of the house.

"In coming into the property an astonishing number of old deeds in many chests had been handed over to us, and demanded sorting and investigation. A large number of them pertained to the estates that my husband owned, some of them going back five hundred years and impossible for those inexperienced in court-hand and legal documents full of contractions to decipher. But there were others that did not belong to our property, that had come into the hands of a collateral great-great-uncle, a noted lawyer, who had taken the remainder of a lease for ninety-nine years of manors and estates, and which manors and estates on the termination of the lease had reverted to the proprietors; nevertheless, the deeds had been retained relative to this particular lease.

"Whilst I was engaged along with an upholsterer daily in hanging curtains, arranging carpets, choosing wall-papers, hanging pictures and the like, my husband and daughter occupied themselves in wading through and cataloguing and assorting the vast accumulation of deeds, to the best of their ability.

"At the end of a fortnight they both came to me in great excitement, to inform me that they had come across all the papers, deeds, and parchments for generations back concerning the very house we had just rented, and into which we had settled. This was