CHAPTER XII.
SOME ODD FACTS ABOUT THE TILED HOUSE--BEING AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF THE GHOST OF A HAND.
I'm sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious.

But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is--marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors called winter's tales--which gathered details from every narrator, and dilated in the act of narration.

Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted.

Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth--an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can't.
Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.
I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular as well as characteristic.

But my publisher meets me with his _veto_; and I believe he is right.