"I never shut eye for five weeks, Miss, no sleep at all. You may not believe me, but there's reason for it, doctor said,—brown kitis. No, I never slept, and that's fact. An' one night I he-ard noise, like as though summun come to see how I were, the young maister or sum of women folk. And then I felt summat waarm an' heavy like lie down top o' me. I did raise mysel' to see what 'twere,—an' there weren't nothing."
This uncomfortable behaviour was less than the ghost did with other people. "It took an' scrooped arm-chair round," it broke the glass and china, upset the dairy, and rattled milk pans. Now for the cause of all this disturbance. The farmer at Atherfield in days long gone by,—but I will continue in the man's words, which I wrote down immediately after he told me the tale:—
"—Ee wanted servant, so ee went to Union. In them days any as wanted servant very young like would go to Forest House (Parkhurst Union), an' they'd plenty o' young girls there. Well this man ee took one for servant down Atherfield,—an then she disappeared. And all this is true. I never taalks about sech things if not true, 'twould only unsettle folks. Her body was found in mixen."
In nearly every instance I have given there is some reason for the return of the spirit to its earthly abode, but, did time permit, I could give you many instances of hauntings with apparently no reason for ghostly unrest on the part of the dead. It is simply, as I have already said, that "everyone walks." We find the fear of this return in the custom that insists on the opening of all doors and windows when the coffin has been carried out; this used always to be the case at Lymington, for instance. I was given no reason as to why salt should be put on the floor under a coffin, or why the wise woman of Lymington aforementioned always collected biscuits at funeral feasts, but Mr. Heanley has given me the reason for another custom I knew of,—ringing a merry peal after a funeral, "or a single bell rung very quickly. It was," he wrote,
