turn-tail cur.” 

 “Aye, but there’s this in it, Dowlas,” said the landlord, speaking in a tone of much candour and tolerance. “There’s folks, i’ my opinion, they can’t see ghos’es, not if they stood as plain as a pike-staff before ’em. And there’s reason i’ that. For there’s my wife, now, can’t smell, not if she’d the strongest o’ cheese under her nose. I never see’d a ghost myself; but then I says to myself, “Very like I haven’t got the smell for ’em.” I mean, putting a ghost for a smell, or else contrairiways. And so, I’m for holding with both sides; for, as I say, the truth lies between ’em. And if Dowlas was to go and stand, and say he’d never seen a wink o’ Cliff’s Holiday all the night through, I’d back him; and if anybody said as Cliff’s Holiday was certain sure, for all that, I’d back him too. For the smell’s what I go by.” 

 The landlord’s analogical argument was not well received by the farrier—a man intensely opposed to compromise. 

 “Tut, tut,” he said, setting down his glass with refreshed irritation; “what’s the smell got to do with it? Did ever a ghost give a man a black eye? That’s what I should like to know. If ghos’es want me to believe in ’em, let ’em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places—let ’em come where there’s company and candles.” 

 “As if ghos’es ’ud want to be believed in by anybody so ignirant!” said Mr. Macey, in deep disgust at the farrier’s crass incompetence to apprehend the conditions of ghostly phenomena. 

 

CHAPTER VII.

 Yet the next moment there seemed to be some evidence that ghosts had a more condescending disposition than Mr. Macey attributed to them; for the pale thin figure of Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing in the warm light, uttering no word, but looking round at the company with his strange unearthly eyes. The long pipes gave a simultaneous movement, like the antennae of startled insects, and every man present, not excepting even the sceptical farrier, had an impression that he saw, not Silas Marner in the flesh, but an apparition; for the door by which Silas had entered was hidden by the high-screened seats, and no one had noticed his approach. Mr. Macey, sitting a long way off the ghost, might be supposed to have felt an argumentative triumph, which would tend to neutralize his share of the general alarm. Had he not always said that when Silas Marner was in that strange trance of his, his soul went loose from his body? Here was the demonstration: 

 Prev. P 45/156 next