"My dear bairn! my pratty bairn! my noble bairn!" exclaimed she with a bounding heart, as she stood over him in affectionate admiration. Joe wept, in spite of his efforts to master tears,--but, at length, recovered sufficient self-possession to lead his aged protectress back to her chair, and to recommence the conversation. "You will consent, then, I hope, to let me go, kind mother," he said, still holding her hand. "The Lord's will be done, bairn!" replied Deborah, in a tone of calm and natural piety. "Yes," added she, with resumed cheerfulness, and in her customary firm under-tone,--"thou shal' go, Joey, lad! and thy pocket shall not be empty, nayther!" "Nay, dear mother," answered the high-minded lad,--"I have already burdened you too heavily, and I will never consent to rob you of the refuge of your old age:--remember, I have hands and health, and can work for my own support." "God forbid thou should'st be idle!" answered the dame;--"for idleness leads to sin and crime, while honest labour needs never be ashamed. But a few guineas in thy pocket will do thee no harm, an' thou husbands 'em well. More than that, 'There's no knowing what a man may have to meet when he leaves home,' thou know'st is an old saying, and thou'lt find it so apt, that thou'lt think on't when thou has left me, mayhap." A calm and provident conversation ensued, during which Joe agreed to accept a purse of twenty spade-aces from the good old dame, after she had assured him it would by no means straiten her means either of subsistence or plenty. "And now, dear Joey," said the kind old woman, "let me persuade thee to throw aside some o' thy whirligig notions. Do not contradict every body thou meets who are so old-fashioned as to believe what their forefathers taught 'em. More than all, Joey," continued Deborah, with some warmth, "I'm shocked at your stubbornness in trying to deny what the Scripter says about foul spirits:--the Lord keep us from them!--and, especially at your daring to threap so stoutly that the dead never come again!" "Indeed, dame," replied Joe, in a tone of conciliation and respect, "I never denied these things out of stubbornness, but because they are opposed to all experience:--who, and where, is the person, now living, that has really seen a ghost?" "Who--and where--Joe?" echoed Deborah, with a strange and solemn look. Joe felt amazed that he had not, before he had asked the last question, called to mind the dame's serious observations in the ferry-boat, five years before, and sat gazing upon the changed countenance of his aged mistress with intense earnestness. "Joe," continued Deborah, after a deep pause succeeding her emphatic echo of the youth's sceptical question,--"I thought to have kept what I am about to reveal of the dead as a solemn secret, and to have buried it with me, in my grave; but to save thee from foul unbelief about such solemn things, I will reveal it to thee.