Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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There is hardly any country place in the United Kingdom but owns some superstitution, which many of the inhabitants have full belief in.

At all ages, and in every place, there have been found many who have entertained the belief that at certain periods the dead are permitted to revisit the earth for a brief period; and it was said in the neighbourhood that the deceased landlady of the “Carved Lion” could not rest in her grave without, in disembodied spirit, occasionally hovering about the old hostelry.

She had been a hard-fisted, money-loving woman in her time, and the frequenters of the inn were wont to talk about her ghost being seen on the common, in one of the dark lanes or elsewhere, in the “witching time of night.”

“She must have growed a good bit since she died,” said the woman, who had been called Nelly, “for she was a good deal shorter than that gawk there when she wur here. It’s all nonsense, I tell ’ee. If people goes to a better world they don’t want to come back to a place like this, and if they go to another place——”