The pedlar's falsehood and audacity,—and the whispered caution of the bookseller, whom Joe felt strongly inclined to characterise as an abettor of imposture and knavery,—the credulity of the butter-women,—and the gaping wonder manifested by the listening crowd,—formed a mass of striking corroborations,—a sort of powerful running commentary on what he had hastily read in the volume he had just purchased. The incidents in the little market, in fact, opened to the lad's inexperienced mind a glimpse of the melancholy truth that man and the multitude have been prone to superstition in all ages, and have eagerly received frauds which have been imposed upon them, throughout all time, by the craft of interested and organised parties; or, where these were wanting, that man has forged deceptions for himself, through the strength of his own wondering faculty. The end to which these incipient reasonings would lead him was not, and could not, then, be manifest to him; or Joe, scarcely rid of his fanatical incubus, would have revolted from them with horror. It was merely the dawn of thoughts which were waiting to break in upon his mind with all the power and effulgence of new truth. But, whatever might be the tendency of these commencing reasonings, the progress of them was speedily arrested by the beginning of the journey homewards.
Joe, with the good old dame behind him, rode as far as the Trent ferry, at Stockwith, in company with sundry rustic frequenters of the weekly market. The gossip chiefly consisted of a recapitulation of the prices of corn and flax, and poultry, and pigs, and butter,—until the re-introduction of the ghost-story, at what time Joe and his foster-mother, with the rest, were seated in the ferry-boat, and were recrossing the Trent.
"Well,—it's an awful accoont, Maister Gawky!" exclaimed Diggory Dowlson, the rough old ferryman, after an Axholmian farmer had briefly recounted the pedlar's tale; "but I've heeard many sich i' my time,—thof I nivver seed nowt mysen."
"And the Lord send I nivver may!" ejaculated Betty Bogglepeep, a tottering old wife of Owston, who had, the day before, as she said, in the course of her gossip, chopped off the head of her best black hen, because she crowed like a cock:—"the Lord send I nivver may, for it maks me queer to think a thowt o' sich things; and I'm sewer if I woz to see 'em, it would freeten me oot o' my wits!"
"Hold thy foolish tongue, prithee!" chimed in her loving husband, whose bravery seemed chiefly owing to his late fellowship with Sir John Barleycorn, at the market:—"why does ta talk aboot being freeten'd at shadows?"
"Nay, nay, Davy, it's to no use puttin' it off i' that way," interjected the old ferryman, taking up the cause of the old woman and the ghost, with the fervour of gallantry and faith united;—"depend on't, though deead folks may come like shadows, yet it's a fearful seeght to see 'em!"
"No doot, no doot, Diggory!" replied the farmer, "but seeing 'em's all—thoo knaws!"
The farmer meant this for an arch sally, but his companions in the boat were not in the vein to relish his humour.
"What do you think aboot sich solemn things, Dame Thrumpkinson?" asked the old ferryman, turning to the corner of the boat where Deborah seemed buried in reflection;—"you sit and say not a word, all this time. Give us your thowts, dame, for ye've more sense than all of us, put together!"
"I don't give heed to every fool's tale about such things," replied Dame Deborah, in her usual grave tone; "but I've serious reason for believing that the dead often know what the living are doing."