The great horror, however, of the haunted glen was the _Headless Horseman_. The phantom generally made its appearance among thickets of tangled bushes, which no horse could penetrate, and glided silently over uneven and broken ground, where no horse could have gone. It always appeared to be ridden and guided by a man in flowing robes, whose feet were firmly in the stirrups and whose hands held the bridle, but whose head had been chopped off, leaving only a red and jagged stump. The ghastly spectacle was so minutely described by the Brontës that others carried the picture of it in their imaginations, and it is not to be wondered at if many thought they saw the spectre among the shimmering shadows of the trees. A neighbor of the Brontës, Kaly Nesbit, a very old and, I believe, a very good man, once gave to a number of us a vivid account of the apparition. He told the story with great earnestness, and with apparent conviction as to its truth. I give his account as nearly as I can in his own quaint language: “I heerd the horse nichering in the glen. It was not the voice of a horse but of a fiend, for it came out of the bowels of the earth, and shook the hills, and made the trees quake. Besides, there was no room for a horse on the steep bank, and among the bushes and brablack. ”I had just had a drap of whiskey, about a noggin, and I wasn’t a bit afeard of witch or warlock, ghost or devil, and so I stepped into the glen to see for myself whatever was to be seen. “At first I could not see any inkling of a horse, but I heerd the branches swishing along his sides, at the lower end of the glen. Then I saw a large dark object as big as a haystack coming nixt me, and walking straight through trees and bushes as if they were mere shadows. “I juked down behind a hedge of broom, and as I hunkered in the shadow he came on in the slightly dusk light. The horse was as big as four horses, and at a distance I thought the rider was a huge blackavised man; but when he came fornenst me the moon fell full upon him through a break in the trees, and then I saw that he was crulged up on the saddle, and that only a red and ghastly stump stuck up between his shoulders, where his head should have been. ”I escaped unseen, but just as the terrible thing passed me it nichered again horribly, and I saw sparks of fire darting out of its mouth. “It then turned and cut triangle across the valley, passing over the cockpit, and walking upon the air, as it emerged into the moonlight. It walked up straight against the steep edge of the quarry-pit, and vanished into the bank. I saw it vanishing by degrees, like a shadow, at first black, but growing lighter and lighter, till it entirely disappeared, and there was nothing on the high bank where it stopped but the bright moonlight.”