two short hours the permitted time of my wanderings on earth shall be over; for had I escaped the cruel knife, I would have died in my bed this evening a greyheaded old man.’ It disappeared as it spoke; and from that night was never more seen nor heard by the inmates of the farmhouse.” According to Hogg-- “Certain it is, from that day to this, The ghaist of the pedlar was never mair seen.” It seems curious enough that such a story should have been received for many years as true in a district of country in which the people hold, as strict Calvinists, that no man, however sudden or violent his death, can die before his appointed time. It may, however, belong to a somewhat remoter period than that assigned to it--some time in the early half of the last century--and may have originated in the age of the curates, whose theology is understood to have been Arminian. Another of my companion’s stories, communicated on this occasion, had its scene laid in a district of country full sixty miles away. [Sidenote: THE GREEN LADY.] 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, seemed 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 disoblige 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; and 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 lightly 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 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 erelong.” John accordingly rode home, and told his story.