Ezekiel did his best to turn the matter into a joke, but his guests could not be roused from their inexplicable gloomy emotions. One by one they made excuses and departed and at last the lawyer was left alone with his ghostly visitor.
From that time onward whenever Ezekiel had a party the wizened figure of the spectre was present. He would sit without speaking at the banqueting table or walk slowly among the dancers until at length, gazing full at the Lord of Rosewarne, he would utter an unearthly laugh of derision and disappear.
Soon Ezekiel Grosse’s friends all deserted him and he was left an old and lonely man, whose sole companion was one, John Call, his clerk.
So Grosse sought to bargain with the spectre, and had at last to consent to give up all his worldly possessions to John Call. When the deeds were signed the ghost finally disappeared, uttering one last demoniac peal of laughter as he went.
Old Ezekiel only survived for a few weeks. One morning he was found dead, and the country folk tell that at his funeral a crowd of grinning demons appeared, which afterwards flew away over Carn Brea, and that from its midst came the same horrible laughter that the spectre had been heard so often to emit.
Rosewarne, the scene of this story, lies in that barren mining country which every visitor to Cornwall should see. It is intensely interesting, and permission is not difficult to obtain, to visit some of the tin mines where an industry, carried on in Cornwall since the days of the Phoenicians, still survives.
The hills and moorland of this district are scarred with old workings and abandoned mine buildings. Rugged Carn Brea, crowned by prehistoric remains and the ruins of an ancient castle, rises 740 feet high, close by the main line between Redruth and Camborne. Here, they say, was the chief centre of Druid worship in the west. This district is easy of access from St. Ives, Penzance, Falmouth or Truro, and a visit to it will ever be remembered with pleasure, bleak and dreary though the mine riddled land may seem at first sight.
Carn Brea.
