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and the beginning of this, and for tlie most part were as utterly 

 contemptible as the creations of mere fashion always are. All 

 that, notwithstanding those who idealised, however roughly, the 

 memories of an eerie domicile like Bridge End House, in very 

 truth rose to the height of anticipating Longfellow's latter-day 

 assurance that " all houses wherein men have lived and died are 

 haunted houses " wherein harmless, inoffensive phantoms meet 

 us noiselessly in doorways and on stairs, by the warm fireside 

 and in the gusty passage. But if Bridge End House was only 

 associated with the wholly vague, indefinite, unsubstantial, 

 legendless boggart, Bm-nley had another homestead in its very 

 midst with a boggart of a somewhat more precisely stated charac- 

 ter. The schoolboy of twenty-five years ago passed Bankhouse, 

 the residence in youth of the present noble Bishop of Sodor and 

 Man, and at a later day of the present President of the Burnley 

 Literary and Scientific Club — the schoolboy of twenty-five years 

 ago passed Bankhouse on a dark windy night with a tremulous 

 shiver, half expecting that strange lights would be seen gleaming 

 from its windows, and that from between the two or three grimy, 

 withered trees that still existed in its grounds, some uncannie 

 figure would suddenly start up. Li this case the voice of tradi- 

 tion did condescend so far to particulars as to affirm that within 

 the walls of this fine old residence a servant girl had once upon 

 a time been foully murdered, and that every now and then the 

 spirit of tlie hapless maiden showed itself in her ancient home to 

 revive human horror and disgust at the merciless wretch who 

 knew not how to " spare that bonnie face to hae been some man's 

 joy." Here we have the key by which to unriddle the mystery 

 of most modern East Lancashire boggarts. " Eachel crying for 

 her children and refusing to be comforted" has, alas, always been 

 a familiar, if agonising, figure in human society, as she still is ; 

 but where the bereaved mother of to-day finds an anodyne for 

 her grief in change of scene or occupation, the mother of a 

 hundred years ago robbed by Nature, or, still worse, by violence, 

 of the darling of her heart and hopes, could do nothing, travel 

 being difficult and expensive, and popular literature unknown, 

 but brood and live on her grief until the loved and lost one 

 became to her partial eyes a nightly visitor in angel form, or 

 until the revolting villain who took away that treasured life 

 began, in imagination at least, to haunt in ceaseless pain and 

 torment the scene for ever blasted by his pitiless crime. The 

 crowd, with the tendencies of the age, caught and fantastically 

 exaggerated, or unconsciously caricatured, the not unnatural 

 illusion of the solitary mourner. Sacred sorrow and exalted 

 grief, it often happened, were vulgarised and degraded by the 

 efforts of the cold and callous and unimaginative to transmute 

 them into boggart form. -The fashion of the time made men 



