“The presence in the room” made no reply. The bishop repeated the question,—
The ghost only heaved a deep sigh, and, while the bishop rang the bell, to call his slumbering servant, her ghostship quietly drew some old “papers from its ghost of a pocket,” and commenced reading them to herself.
After the bishop had kept on ringing for the stupid servant, the form arose, thrust the papers out of sight, and left as noiselessly and sedately as she had arrived.
“Well, what have you seen?” asked the bishop, when the servants were aroused.
“Seen, my lord?”
“Ay, seen! or who—what was the woman who has been here?”
“Woman, my lord?”
(It is said one of the fellows smiled, that a woman should have been in the aged bishop’s bed-chamber in the night.)
When the bishop had related what he had seen, the domestics apprehended that his lordship had been dreaming, against which the good man protested, and only told what his eyes had beheld. The story that the bishop had been visited by a ghost soon got well circulated, which greatly “diverted the ungodly, at the good prelate’s expense, till finally it reached the ears of the keeper of a mad-house in the diocese, who came and deposed that a female lunatic had escaped from his custody on that night” (in light apparel), who, finding the gates and doors of the palace open, had marched directly to his lordship’s chamber. The deponent further stated that the lunatic was always reading a bundle of papers.