The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of Sir Walter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to the opening in the "Monastery," of the story of the White Lady of Avenel. The wife of a Banffshire proprietor of the minor class had been about six months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on horseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, was accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood of her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in the form of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request, too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turned his horse to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was, however, a personage that could be better seen than felt; she came in contact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been an ill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of the streamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turned fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mistress!!" exclaimed the ploughman. "Yes, John, _your mistress_," replied the ghost. "But ride home, my bonny man, for it's growing late: you and I will be better acquainted ere long." John accordingly rode home and told his story.