'
And so on, and on, and on flowed the stream of old Sally's narrative,
while Lilias dropped into dreamless sleep, and then the story-teller
stole away to her own tidy bed-room and innocent slumbers.
CHAPTER XII.
SOME ODD FACTS ABOUT THE TILED HOUSE--BEING AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF
THE GHOST OF A HAND.
I'm sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was
veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly
is--marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors called winter's tales--which
gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of
narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to
be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of
truth--an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my
readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can't.
Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753,
gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House,
which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such
fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates
it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.
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