He paused in his work, leaned his grizzled chin on the handle of his spade, and as a scared look spread itself over his shrivelled face, he answered me thus: ‘There be zum foak in these parts, miss, as vow they’ve seen th’ White Raven, and they doa say as how them as sees it dies within th’ week. But I doan’t know if them as said they’ve seen it died or not.’ ‘Have you seen it, Jack,’ I asked, trying to look very serious, though I could scarcely keep from laughing. ‘Noa, noa, thank God, noa!’ he exclaimed with startling earnestness, and mopping his bald head with his red handkerchief, although the weather was cold, while his tanned and weather-beaten cheeks seemed to me to become pale. Then he asked, ‘Have you been in what we foak call the oak chamber?’ Guessing what room he referred to I told him that I had, and he at once said that it was in that chamber that the mysterious White Raven always showed itself to the doomed person. Of course I was incredulous, and ridiculed the whole idea; nor can I say I was more deeply impressed when on a subsequent and more critical examination of the chamber I found the following doggerel carved in old English on one of the panels-- The stranger who beneath this roof shall lie, And sees the White Raven is sure to die; For a curse rests on the unhallowed place, And the blood that was shed you here may trace. So, stranger, beware, sleep not in the room, Lest you should meet with a terrible doom. From people in the neighbouring villages I learned that in this very room, which I had been prompted to call the haunted chamber, tradition said that at some distant period a very beautiful lady had been brutally done to death by a jealous and dissipated husband, who gave out that she had eloped. He allowed her body to fester and moulder away in the room, and many years afterwards her skeleton was found, and that since then she had haunted the place in the shape of a white raven, while to anyone to whom she appeared it was a fatal sign. But why that should have been so nobody attempted to explain.