"you promise me you will?" "I swear it," replied her heartbroken swain, who was now assisted down the scaffold steps, while the woman, apparently unconcerned, turned to meet her fate.
Three long years rolled on, and the next scene in this strange life-drama was that of a vessel helplessly, and almost hopelessly, floundering in the trough of a tempestuous sea, amongst the crew of which was the young sailor whom we last met at the "Gallows Tree." Every moment did the captain, as the storm increased in violence, expect his craft to be submerged. Yet the hurricane knew no abatement, wave after wave overlapping each other with fresh fury, till one huge billow, snapping the masts fore and aft like matchwood, and rebounding from the deck, shot upwards like a waterspout, till it seemed lost in the thunderclouds above. Now some hours later, when the gale had somewhat subsided, it was discovered that the young sailor had been spirited away, and, moreover, from that day to this, has never been heard of. "Washed overboard," you would naturally say, and so should I if I hadn't the testimony of the whole of that ship's crew to the effect that the devil himself rode the waves on that fearful occasion, surrounded by a posse of fiends who bore in their midst a beautiful woman, who, with the magnetism of love, drew her sailor sweetheart to her arms, whisking him from the deck of that shattered vessel into the obscurity beyond. There is, I understand, a prosaic reading of this legend, from which the more poetic may have been taken, or vice versâ.
"The miser's ghost."
However this may be, let us, without more ado, hurry off in a flight of fancy to Rosewarne Hall. What?—you never heard of it—never heard of the Ghost of Rosewarne? Then follow me closely, remembering at the same time that it is no business of ours how Ezekiel Grosse, the lawyer, became possessed of the fine
