“Ah, you should see Boscastle, sir. It’s a wonderful place. That’s where I was born, sir. When I was a by that church was haunted, sir. It’s a damp place, and the wind in it awful. I du believe it stand higher than any church in the country, and have got more wind in it of a stormy night than any church whatsomever. Well, they said it was haunted; and sure enough every now and then there was a knocking heard down below. And this always took place of a stormy night, as if there was some poor thing down in the low wouts (_vaults_), and he wasn’t comfortable and wanted to get out. Well, one night it was so plain and so fearful it was that the sexton he went and took the blacksmith and a ship’s carpenter down to the harbour, and they go up together, and they hearken all over the floor, and they open one of the old family wouts that belongs to the Penhaligans, and they go down with a light. Now the wind it was a-blowing all as usual, only worse than common. And there to be sure what do they see but the wout half-full of sea-water, and nows and thens a great spout coming in through a hole in the rock; for it was high-water and a wind off the sea, as I tell you. And there was a coffin afloat on the water, and every time the spout come through, it set it knocking agen the side o’ the wout, and that was the ghost.” “What a horrible idea!” I said, with a half-shudder at the unrest of the dead. The old man uttered a queer long-drawn sound,--neither a chuckle, a crow, nor a laugh, but a mixture of all three,--and turned himself yet again to the work which, as he approached the end of his narration, he had suspended, that he might make his story _tell_, I suppose, by looking me in the face. And as he turned he said, “I thought you would like to be comfortable then as well as other people, sir.”