SOME GARDEN GHOSTS 



monument, through the massive granite door of which she 

 who stood in the upright coffin was supposed to be gazing 

 down upon the distant prospect of our own home. It was 

 never without an awful sense of horror and mystery that 

 I pictured those dead eyes, endowed with miraculous 

 vision, piercing through wood and stone to stare out upon 

 what she still loved. Some apprehension of the horror and 

 tragedy of bodily death and of the dread power of the spirit 

 seized hold of my small soul as I contemplated that grave 

 of human folly and of poor human aspiration. There it 

 was, perhaps, that an overpowering dislike of graveyards 

 began in me. 



Lady Tidd was seen by a 'gardener of ours, between two 

 Yew trees, in a dark corner outside the garden wall. 

 " She riz up out of the ground at me/' he told my mother. 

 And he added, as a convincing detail, that his hat stood 

 up on his equally rising hair. " Sure, wasn't me hat lifted 

 an inch off me head, ma'm 1 " 



My mother, strong-souled creature as she was, laughed 

 with a fine scepticism. Another kind of spirit had done 

 the mischief, she declared. But we who heard could not 

 so easily dismiss the agonizingly fascinating tale. We 

 knew that spot outside the garden wall, in the shadow of 

 the black Yew trees ,- and the fear and the darkness that 

 always fell upon us when we passed it. 



Another dreaded place was a certain Primrose dell, beauti- 

 fully starred with blossoms, beautifully green, beautifully 



235 



