Partly, too, it may be due to another circumstance.

For it is said by present shepherds in that district that during the nights of Christmas week flitting shapes are seen in the open space around the trilithon, together with the gleam of a weapon, and the shadow of a man dragging a burden into the hollow.
But of these things there is no certain testimony.
Christmas 1881.
A COMMITTEE-MAN OF 'THE TERROR' We had been talking of the Georgian glories of our old-fashioned watering- place, which now, with its substantial russet-red and dun brick buildings in the style of the year eighteen hundred, looks like one side of a Soho or Bloomsbury Street transported to the shore, and draws a smile from the modern tourist who has no eye for solidity of build.

The writer, quite a youth, was present merely as a listener.

The conversation proceeded from general subjects to particular, until old Mrs.H--, whose memory was as perfect at eighty as it had ever been in her life, interested us all by the obvious fidelity with which she repeated a story many times related to her by her mother when our aged friend was a girl--a domestic drama much affecting the life of an acquaintance of her said parent, one Mademoiselle V--, a teacher of French.

The incidents occurred in the town during the heyday of its fortunes, at the time of our brief peace with France in 1802-3.
'I wrote it down in the shape of a story some years ago, just after my mother's death,' said Mrs.H--.