Sally answered by another nod. Indeed, fascinated by the earnestness of the speaker, no less than by the mystery which seemed hidden in his words, Sally's head oscillated up and down with regular motion, following with ready acquiescence the current of Seth Dumbrick's utterances. "Other people have had dreams," said Seth Dumbrick, "that signify something, and led to something. There was Maria Marten. You know about her." Sally, who had seen the tragedy of _Maria Marten, or the Murder at the Red Barn_ enacted at a penny show, replied eagerly: "I've seed her! and I've seed the pickaxe--and the grave--and the blood!" "That all came of a dream. A mole-catcher her father was, and she was a fine young woman. The girl went away from home one fine day, dressed up in man's clothes. She had a sweetheart, and she was going to meet him to be married. But instead of taking her to church her sweetheart took her to the Red Barn, and shot her. Now it was a year afterwards that Maria appeared to her mother in a dream----" "Yes, yes!" cried Sally. "Dressed in a white bedgownd. She was at the show." "--and said that she'd been murdered, and buried in the Red Barn. Well, her mother told her dream, and the peopled laughed at her. But the ghost came to her a second time the next night, and a third time the next, and then the mother wouldn't be denied. They went to the Red Barn, and there they found Maria, done up in a sack, and buried under the floor. Every word of it is true. Now," said Seth, graciously and condescendingly, as though he were about to present Sally with a large piece of plum-cake, "I'll tell you something that I wouldn't tell to everybody. I saw that man hung." Sally gazed at him with eyes dilated to their fullest extent. Seth Dumbrick, gratified at this exhibition of interest, moistened his thumb. "I was there, and saw him hung. Corder his name was, and it's--ah, it's twenty odd year ago. I was a young man then, and I went to all the executions." "Why?" inquired Sally, without any special reason for asking; adding as an afterthought, "Was they nice?" Seth Dumbrick rasped his bristly chin again with his horny hands. "Can't exactly say why," he honestly answered. "They wasn't particularly nice. I've seen seven men in a string. I can see 'em now, all of a row." Staring into space upon this gloomy imagining, Seth Dumbrick paused a sufficient time to see the black cap; drawn over the faces of the doomed men, and the ropes adjusted. Which being done, and the men disposed of, he resumed the former topic.