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where they did not hke to be alone lest they should fall in with 

 company other than mortal. This brow, that pool, yonder thick 

 dark plantation, were all reputed to be haunted by boggarts, and 

 the very brook that linked them together was supposed to bubble 

 not inarticulate sounds, but human words of grief or warning, 

 As for the people who dwelt under the venerable shadow of the 

 village church, there was nothing between the two backs of the 

 Bible that they belived with more implicit faith than that at 

 midnight the spirits of the departed rose from their quiet graves 

 in God's own acre and rambled restless until cockcrow through 

 and around the sleeping hamlet. It need hardly be said that the 

 superstitious belief in boggarts, like the superstitious importance 

 that used to be attached to dreams, has long since given way to 

 scientific curiosity — that is to say, where any lively interest is 

 taken in such matters at all. The enthusiasts of Science are 

 fully entitled to say, of course, that this simply means that the 

 world by their efforts has become more enlightened than it used 

 to be, and that the order or state of mind that was wont to be 

 influenced by the "visions of the night," as the result of their 

 labours, has to a large extent passed away. But the enthusiasts 

 of Literature, prompt and ready as they always are to hail with 

 delight whatever is good and beautiful in the kindling dawn of 

 human progress, are yet never weary of catching the subdued 

 glories of the setting sun. The grandfathers and grandmothers 

 of the present generation, the men and women whose sturdy 

 common sense, indomitable perseverance, ideal integrity, and 

 keen-sighted shrewdness laid the sure foundation of modern 

 Lancashire prosperity, believed in boggarts with all the force of 

 their refreshing individuality. What is our title to laugh them 

 to scorn ? What right have we to withhold from them the 

 homage of reverential respect even in their misbelief? In the 

 first place, the boggarts in which they believed were long-inherited 

 legacies from the fanciful past, when everything in the way of 

 magic, witchcraft, and sooth-saying bore a far deeper meaning 

 in common life than it does now. In the next place, though all 

 may agree that boggart lore is but a rubbish heap of human 

 superstition, do not let us forget that in the rubbish heaps of 

 ages the archaeologist finds illustrations of the daily life of our 

 remote ancestors, without which the store of human knowledge 

 would be much reduced ; and that on the spoil banks of our coal 

 mines and quarries the geologist picks up bits of shale and frag- 

 ments of limestone which enable us to see as if by miracle what 

 life was like on this globe of ours " when the morning stars sang 

 together and the sons of God shouted for joy." In like manner, 

 be assured, we cannot turn over and ransack the cobwebs, the 

 dust, the damp moss, the mouldering drapery associated with 

 boggarts and their doings without encountering glimpses of the 



