No one, however, evinced so deep an anxiety on the subject of the miller’s ghost, and its supposed interview with the elder, as the suspected tacksman. It is known that on one occasion he placed himself in the elder’s way when the latter was returning from a funeral, and solicited a few minutes’ private conversation with him; but was sternly repelled. “You can have but one business with me,” the elder said; “and, if your conscience be clear from blood, not one itself.” Whatever hand the tacksman may have had in the miller’s death, no one who knew him, or the circumstances in which he had parted on the fatal night from old Saunders, could regard him as a murderer; though few real murderers ever wore out life in greater apparent unhappiness than he. He never after held up his head, but went about his ordinary labours dejected and spiritless, and invincibly taciturn; and, some few years subsequent to the event, he fell into a lingering illness, of which he died. Were one _making_ a ghost story, it would be no difficult matter to make a more satisfactory one. Never was there a ghost that appeared to less purpose than that of the miller, or was less fortunate in securing a publisher for its secret; but sure I am, never was there a ghost story more firmly believed in the immediate scene of it, or narrated with greater truth-like minuteness of detail, or with less suspicion of at least the _honesty_ of the parties on whose testimony it rested. Nor was it without its effect in adding strength, within the sphere of its influence, to the fence set around the sacred tabernacle of the human soul. Where such stories are credited, the violent spilling of man’s life is never regarded as merely “the diverting of a little red puddle from its source.” CHAPTER XXVI. “Oh, many are the poets that are sown By nature; men endow’d with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”--WORDSWORTH. [Sidenote: THE LITERATI OF CROMARTY.]