"Yo may ha' been born there," interjected a Sheffield huckster, with a satirical grin; "but it's many a moile off!"
The pedlar strode rapidly away to a distant part of the market.
"Why, you dooant doot what th' man says, do you, Roger?" asked a fair Axholmian butter-maiden of the huckster.
"Daht!" replied the Sheffielder, in his own dialect; "I al'ays daht loies, mun! But come, lass! tak t'other hawp'ny a pahnd, and bring t' basket along wi' thee!"
"Marcy on us!" exclaimed the butter-woman in spectacles, as the rude huckster left the market; "you Sheffield fellow'll hev to see a ghooast before he believes there is one! What an alarming accoont this is, to be sewer!"
"Would you be so kind," said Joe to the elderly dame who uttered this latter exclamation, "as to let me look at the account for a few minutes? I will return it to you again, very soon."
"Why, yes,—I'll let you look at it," answered the woman, scanning him from head to foot; "and I hope you'll take a lesson from the book, and never act so wickedly as this young man did."
It was not mere curiosity which prompted the lad to ask the loan of the pedlar's tract. He felt certain that he had glanced at a similar tale in a volume of old pamphlets on the bookseller's stall, but a few minutes before. After a short search, he found the volume again, and comparing the stories, saw that they were the same, to a letter, save that the copy on the stall affirmed the apparition to have taken place in Westmoreland, more than half-a-century before. While his thoughts were all in a tumult at this strange discovery, the bookseller, who was attentive to the behaviour of his customers, stept up, and addressed him in a whisper.
"You look surprised, young man," he said, while Joe gazed at the sinister expression in his countenance; "but I knew it was all an old story, though the fellow was making such a noise about it. Say nothing about it, however,—for all trades must live,—and most people would think one tale as good and as true as the other!"
The bookseller was only just in time with his precept of caution; for Joe's gathering indignation at the pedlar's imposture would have impelled him, the next moment, to break through his boyish bashfulness, and proclaim his discovery aloud, in the ears of the surrounding butter-women:—a proceeding which, in lieu of thanks, would have, no doubt, drawn down upon his head a storm of wrath from their disturbed superstition. Feeling unspeakably confused with his reflections, Joe now hastily returned the volume to its place on the stall; and thanking the kind butter-woman for her loan of the ghost-story, gave it carefully into her hands. He then hasted away towards the little inn where he was to meet Dame Deborah, partly under an impression that his hours of liberty were near their expiry,—but much more with the persuasion that he would be able, as he went along, being no longer surrounded with the market-din, to disentangle the web of conflicting thought into which the slight incidents just narrated had cast him.