at home, they would have built one-storey
cottages, or large houses, if you will, divided
into little tenements fit for the occupancy
of the poor brick-makers, and bargees, anc
labourers who swelter in crowded kennels
in the back lane and narrow alleys of the
village—paying rents, too, which would secure
them clean, wholesome, airy lodgings
elsewhere. But no, the Dumbledowndeary capitalists
must needs build villas, residences; tin
lord of the manor has said nay to small
tenements. The rents demanded are from twenty-
five to thirty-five pounds a year, of which none
avail themselves; while the brick-makers am
bargees, who could, and who do, pay four and
five shillings a week for their styes, can't move
into better houses, because there are none buill
for men of their degree. They should have
looked at home, you say; but, alas! who can
—who does? I say again. Hearken to Doctor
Goldsmith writing wisdom among the beggars
of Axe Lane, perchance: "Were I to be angry
with men for being fools," he says, " I could
here find ample room for declamation; but,
alas! I have been a fool myself; and why
should I be angry with them for being
something so natural to every child of humanity?"
Let us hope that Dumbledowndeary, the
rashly built, will not longer lack tenants, and
that it will not always be a town to let.

We go for a walk out of Dumbledowndeary.
We leave the church on our right, cross the
railway by a pretty bridge, close to which
a large railway hotel has driven away the
orchards and gooseberry bushes which two
years before flourished in its place, and plunge
into a sweet-smelling, shadowy lane. Mine
host of the Railway Hotel is with us, a cheerful
man and portly, who sings a song and
does not despair of Dumbledowndeary yet.
He carries a lantern; I carry a lantern;
Mr. Caps, the gamekeeper, who has started
up somehow from somewhere, in a velveteen
frock and leather gaiters, carries a lantern.
"What is this for?" you ask, seeing that it
is yet broad day. "We are going to see the
lion of Dumbledowndeary, the wonder, and
terror, and admiration thereof. We are
bound on a voyage of discovery to a haunted
house—a house that has been nailed and
boarded up since the battle of Waterloo, and
which must be consequently rather dark and
gloomy inside."

Now, if you be anything of an amateur in
haunted houses, a connoisseur in domestic
ghosts, you will, doubtless, begin to form in
imagination some very charming pictures of
Elizabethan chambers, mouldy tapestry, and
a stain of blood on the oak flooring which ail
the scrubbing and washing, the scouring,
scraping, and planing in the universe will not
efface. You will be disappointed. You will at
least conjure up a house of passable antiquity,
dating from Queen Anne's reign, we will say.
You will again be disappointed. Passing
through a beautiful park, and over what was
once a lawn, but is now ploughed up and
sown with wheat, you come suddenly on a
substantial brick mansion, so fresh, so neat, so
comfortable in appearance, that, but for the
doorstep overgrown with weeds, the heavy
chains and padlocks on the gates, and a dismal
screen of planking before every window, you
would take it to be in full occupancy now.
In good sooth, it has not been built more than
seventy years; and Mr. Caps's father-in-law,
an apple-cheeked veteran, some ninety odd,
helped to make the bricks from which
the House was built. It belongs to the
lord of the manor; it has been shut up nearly
forty years, and it is haunted. These bald
and unsatisfactory fragments are its whole
history. The very ghost of Dumbledowndeary
is a disappointment. There is no authenticated
legend of a spectre in a white sheet, of an
apparition carrying its head under its arm—
no deaths'-heads, no cross-bones, no blood, no
groans. Everybody agrees, though, that it is
haunted. Mr. Caps's father-in-law says that
there were "noises" heard in the year '32.
Mr. Caps, the gamekeeper, has himself heard
"noises." " Were they ghosts?" we ask,
breathlessly. Mr. Caps scratches the knee
of his corduroys, and says simply, "Poachers."
Even as we wait for his answer, a pheasant
gets up with a whirr, near us, and we shudder.

Mr. Caps, who is master of the ceremonies
pro tem., has the key of the haunted mansion
with him, and we enter. We pass through
room after room, dark and sombre, in which
our lanterns conjure up fantastic, Eembrandt-like
effects. We see the gay paper torn from
the walls, and the flooring gradually yielding
to the dry rot—the nests which the jackdaws
have built in the fire-places. Now and then
mine host punches out a plank from the
window with his walking-stick, and shows us
a glorious view of the country side. We
descend into the kitchens, stumbling over a
decapitated rabbit at the stair-head; we
sigh over the mighty kitchen range, where
the mark of the meat-jack still shows on the
mantel-side; we peep into the larder, where
the ropes to which the joints were hung still
remain; into the scullery, the deserted wine-
ellars, the bins looking like the shelves in a
vault. The house is young and lusty, and
strongly built—why should it go thus to
decay? Mine host whispers something
about the battle of Waterloo, and the
lawyers, and the long minority of the young
lord. So we extinguish our lanterns in the
entrance-hall, thinking that when the House
is occupied again, the spell may be taken off
Dumbledowndeary, and it may be no longer
a town to let.

Small as the commerce of Dumbledown-
deary may be, it is amazingly fertile, and
uccessful in one respect—in ghosts! There
is the vaguely haunted house to begin with,
There is Lady Ruff; who, as I have mentioned,
lies in marble in the church, but who was
accustomed to ride nightly (headless, of
ourse) in a coach and four, round about