lad when they hatched up the conspiracy against him. I ain’t seed him since. Abney Borden said he seed him once, passed him right by one night near the reservoir, an’ the lad didn’ speak to him. More like it were on’y his ghost, I says. Maybe just his ghost looking for the old house; that’s what I think. Lots of ghosts of the old West Hurley folks comes back lookin’ fer their old homes.”

“Humph,” said Tom as he scrutinized his queer acquaintance musingly. He had about decided that the little old man was not altogether sane. “But the old village, I mean where it was, is under water, isn’t it?” he asked.

“In dry spells they come, them ghosts,” the old man said.

“Eh, huh,” said Tom as if this were an interesting item in the manners and customs of spooks. “They don’t expect the whole reservoir is going to be dried up, do they?”

“The old village is part on the slope of the shore,” the old man said. “When the water gets low in a drought you can see summat of the old place, ends of streets, ruins and such like.”

The old man’s rather disconcerting manner of looking straight ahead of him while he talked, and uttering each observation with a kind of mechanical air of absolute certainty, had the effect of rather squelching Tom. And so in this instance he felt properly rebuked for underrating the intelligence of spooks.

“That’s interesting,” he said; “an old ruined village coming to light now and then. Sort of reminds you of a body floating to the surface, huh?”

“Whose body?” the old man asked crisply.

“Oh, nobody’s body in particular,” Tom said. “I just meant—sort of—you know—like a story as you might say. Sort of the same as if an old ship were to rise up in the ocean. You believe in ghosts,” he added cheerily. “Now there might be such a thing as the ghost of a village, mightn’t there? A dead village? Why sure.”

The idea seemed not to impress the old man. But to Tom’s ready imagination there was something captivating in the thought of some old ship, a gallant bark of former days, rising out of the unknown depths of the ocean, and haunting the endless waste.

He did not indeed, believe in ghosts, yet after all if a village that is long since dead and gone, and withdrawn from the sight of men in its watery grave, occasionally creeps forth, a shrunken, soulless remnant of its former self, an 

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