Pomona's Travels: A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former HandmaidenStockton, Frank R.
General
Pomona's Travels: A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former Handmaiden
Stockton, Frank R.
Americans -- Great Britain -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
"Then go back to your young woman and comfort her," I said, which he
did, and when he had gone, not madly rushing into his loved one's arms,
but shuffling along in a timid way, as if he was afraid the ghost
hadn't gone yet, I asked Jone how he happened to think I was here, and
he told me that he and Mr. Poplington had taken the road to the left
when they reached the fork, because that was the proper one, but they
had not gone far before he thought I might not know which way to turn,
so they came back to the fork to wait for me. But I had been closer
behind them than they thought, and I must have come to the fork before
they turned back, so, after waiting a while and going back along the
road without seeing me, they thought that I must have taken the
right-hand road, and they came that way, going down the hill very
carefully. After a while Jone found my hat in the road, which up to
that moment I had not missed, and then he began to be frightened and
they went on faster.
They passed the little house, and as they was going down the hill they
saw ahead of them a man running as if something had happened, so they
let out their bicycles and soon caught up to him. This was Davy; and
when they stopped him and asked if anything was the matter he told
them that a dreadful thing had come to pass. He had been working in the
garden of a house about half a mile back when suddenly there came an
awful crash, and a white animal sprang out of the house with a bit of a
cotton mill fastened to its tail, and then, with a great peal of
thunder, it vanished, and a white ghost rose up out of the ground with
its arms stretching out longer and longer, reaching to clutch him by
the hair. He was not afraid of anything living, but he couldn't abide
spirits, so he laid down his spade and left the garden, thinking he
would go and see the sexton and have him come and lay the ghost.
Then Jone went on to say that of course he could not make head or tail
out of such a story as that, but when he heard that an awful row had
been kicked up in a garden he immediately thought that as like as not I
was in it, and so he and Mr. Poplington ran back, leaving their
bicycles against the hedge, and bringing the young man with them.
Then I told my story, and Mr. Poplington said it was a mercy I was not
killed, and Jone didn't say much, but I could see that his teeth was
grinding.
We all went into the back yard, and there, on the other side of the
clothes, which was scattered all over the ground, we found my tricycle,
jammed into a lot of gooseberry bushes, and when it was dragged out we
found it was not hurt a bit. Davy and his young woman was standing in
the arbor looking very sheepish, especially Davy, for she had told him
what it was that had scared him. As we was going through the house,
Jone taking my tricycle, I stopped to say good-by to the girl.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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