- I bought it on purpose.'
'They don't show, you see, the old uns don't, Mister Jarsper!'
'It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.'
'Well, it WOULD lead towards a mixing of things,' Durdles
acquiesces: pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had
not previously presented itself to him in a merely inconvenient
light, domestically or chronologically. 'But do you think there
may be Ghosts of other things, though not of men and women?'
'What things? Flower-beds and watering-pots? horses and harness?'
'No. Sounds.'
'What sounds?'
'Cries.'
'What cries do you mean? Chairs to mend?'
'No. I mean screeches. Now I'll tell you, Mr. Jarsper. Wait a
bit till I put the bottle right.' Here the cork is evidently taken
out again, and replaced again. 'There! NOW it's right! This time
last year, only a few days later, I happened to have been doing
what was correct by the season, in the way of giving it the welcome
it had a right to expect, when them town-boys set on me at their
worst. At length I gave 'em the slip, and turned in here. And
here I fell asleep. And what woke me? The ghost of a cry. The
ghost of one terrific shriek, which shriek was followed by the
ghost of the howl of a dog: a long, dismal, woeful howl, such as a
dog gives when a person's dead. That was MY last Christmas Eve.'
'What do you mean?' is the very abrupt, and, one might say, fierce
retort.
'I mean that I made inquiries everywhere about, and, that no living
ears but mine heard either that cry or that howl.
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