They tell this story of a place near here:--The master of the house was dead and buried, yet came home every night, and tramped about. As the family felt this was a parson’s job, the parson came one night, and threw a handful of churchyard mould in the face of his deceased parishioner, who thereupon became a black pony. (In these stories the churchyard mould always turns the ghost into a black creature of some sort, but not always as nice a creature as a Dartmoor pony.) They got a halter, and told a boy to run the pony down the side of the valley as hard as ever he could, and jump it across the Wrey. He did as he was told; but, when he jumped, he found he had the halter only, and no pony.--Ghosts cannot cross water; and this ghost of a pony was run down the hill at such a pace that it could not stop itself. It had to attempt the crossing of the water, and vanished in the attempt. The story used always to be told of Thorn Park, a house that is marked on Donn’s map of Devon in 1765, but has long since been pulled down. Of late years I have heard it told of East Wrey, which is a little further up the Wrey valley, and on the other side of the Moreton road. On venturing to question this, I have been answered rather tartly that it must have been at East Wrey, as it was in that part of the valley, and there is no other house up there. Thorn Park has been forgotten. Stories often shift about from place to place in this way. Only a few weeks ago a friend of mine told me a story of Hampton Court and Queen Victoria, which was told him by a man who certainly had means of finding out if it was true. According to Bismarck, _Reflections and Reminiscences_, vol. i, pages 246, 247, substantially the same story was told at Petersburg in 1859 about the Summer Garden and the Empress Catherine. I fancy I have seen it also in one of the Byzantine historians--I am not sure which--about Blachernæ and an Empress who lived many centuries before Catherine. * * * * *