CHAPTER II.
GHOST STORIES.
The Zigzag Club again.—Some “Ghost” Stories.
THE Academy had opened again. September again colored the leaves of the old elms of Yule. The Blue Hills, as lovely as when the Northmen beheld them nearly nine hundred years ago, were radiant with the autumn tinges of foliage and sky, changing from turquoise to sapphire in the intense twilight, and to purple as the shades of evening fell.
The boys were back again, all except the graduating class, some of whom were at Harvard, Brown, and Yale. Master Lewis was in his old place, and Mr. Beal was again his assistant.
The Zigzag Club was broken by the final departure of the graduating class. But Charlie Leland, William Clifton, and Herman Reed, who made a journey on the Rhine under the direction of Mr. Beal, had returned, and they had been active members of the school society known as the Club.
We should say here, to make the narrative clear to those who have not read “Zigzag Journeys in Classic Lands” and “Zigzag Journeys in the Orient,” that the boys of the Academy of Yule had been accustomed each year to form a society for the study of the history, geography, legends, and household stories of some chosen country, and during the long summer vacation as many of the society as could do so, visited, under the direction of their teachers, the lands about which they had studied. This society was called the Zigzag Club, because it aimed to visit historic places without regard to direct routes of travel. It zigzagged in its travels from the associations of one historic story to another, and was influenced by the school text-book or the works of some pleasing author, rather than the guide-book.
The Zigzag books have been kindly received;[1] and we may here remark parenthetically that they do not aim so much to present narratives of travel as the histories, traditions, romances, and stories of places. They seek to tell stories at the places where the events occurred and amid the associations of the events that still remain. The Zigzag Club go seeking what is old rather than what is new, and thus change the past tense of history to the present tense.
[1] More than one hundred thousand volumes have been sold.
Charlie Leland was seated one day on the piazza of the Academy, after school, reading Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales.” Master Lewis presently took a seat beside him; and “Gentleman Jo,” whom we introduced to our readers in “Zigzags in the Occident,” was resting on the steps near them.