"But where is Eliza?" asked Brister Miller.
"She rode right on after the doctor!"
"And you left her to meet such a sight as that!" said Mr. Miller.
"She would do it; she's onerary. There was no need that both of us should go for the doctor!"
Brister Miller called his hired people together, and they alarmed the neighborhood. At midnight a company of men had gathered before the house, who should go and see what this remarkable story could mean.
"I always thought that the girl was rather strange," said Mrs. Miller. "There may be some witchery or other about this Halloween."
Eliza, brave girl that she was, rode firmly towards the hill-side grave-yard. As she came nearer to it the white horse did not appear to be so large as when she first saw it. It was indeed a horse, a live one; it had its forefeet on the lower limbs of an old apple-tree, which limbs were bent downward toward the ground. It was eating apples off the high branches, reaching its long neck up to pick them.
Horses are very fond of apples, and try in every way to get into orchards when they have gained a taste for the fruit. They have been known to unhead apple barrels, and they will eat apples from the lower limbs of a tree, and reach high for the apple limbs after the fruit on the lower limbs are gone. They like sour apples, and in this way become cider drinkers.
Eliza stopped the wagon. She got out of it, and tied the horse to a tree by the roadside. It was midnight—Halloween. She thought of English merrymakings, of the games with apples, of the curious old stories and songs that she had heard on such nights as this in her girlhood. She hurried past the graves and came to the white horse, and said, "Jack! Jack!" The horse seemed alarmed, let his raised body down to the ground, snorted, and trotted away.
Eliza stood there all alone at that still midnight hour.