"I don't know, my dear," replied the worthy clergyman, "a ghost is sometimes very serviceable in a parish. We are but children of a bigger growth, and a bugbear is as necessary sometimes for great babies as small ones, not that I ever used it or should use it; but the people's own imagination did that for me. I have heard, Sir John, that some men when they were lying out to shoot your deer, were scared away by one of them fancying he saw the ghost, and you saved two good haunches of venison, to say nothing of the pasty." "By Jove, that was a jolly ghost indeed," answered Sir John Slingsby, "and I'll give him a crown the first time I meet him. Doctor, a glass of wine." "If ghosts have such effects upon poachers," said Beauchamp, who had been speaking in a low tone to Miss Slingsby, "how happens it that this man, the father of the boy whom Captain Hayward brought hither, fixed his abode in the spirit's immediate neighbourhood?" "Oh he is a sad unbelieving dog," said Dr. Miles; but then suddenly checking himself he added, "and yet I believe in that I do him injustice; there is some good in the man, and a great deal of imagination. Half his faults proceed from an ill-disciplined fancy; but the truth is, being a very fearless fellow, and of this imaginative disposition, I believe he would just as soon have a ghost for a next door neighbour as not. Therefore, I do not suppose that it was from any doubt of the reality of the apparition, but rather in defiance of it, that he setup his abode there; and perhaps he thought, too, that it might serve as a sort of safeguard to him, a protection against the intrusion of persons less bold than himself, at those hours when ghosts and he himself are wont to wander. He knew well that none of the country people would come near him then, for all the ignorant believe in apparitions more or less." "Now, dear Dr. Miles, do tell me," cried Isabella Slingsby with a gay laugh, "whether some of the learned do not believe in them too. If it were put as a serious question to the Rev. Dr. Miles himself, whether he had not a little quiet belief at the bottom of his heart in the appearance of ghosts, what would he answer?"