To tell the truth, the Squire confesses that he used to take a
pleasure in his younger days in setting marvellous stories afloat, and
connecting them with the lonely and peculiar places of the
neighbourhood. Whenever he read any legend of a striking nature, he
endeavoured to transplant it, and give it a local habitation among the
scenes of his boyhood. Many of these stories took root, and he says he
is often amused with the odd shapes in which they will come back to
him in some old woman's narrative, after they have been circulating
for years among the peasantry, and undergoing rustic additions and
amendments. Among these may doubtless be numbered that of the
crusader's ghost, which I have mentioned in the account of my
Christmas visit; and another about the hard-riding Squire of yore; the
family Nimrod; who is sometimes heard in stormy winter nights,
galloping, with hound and horn, over a wild moor a few miles distant
from the Hall. This I apprehend to have had its origin in the famous
story of the wild huntsman, the favourite goblin in German tales;
though, by-the-by, as I was talking on the subject with Master Simon
the other evening in the dark avenue, he hinted that he had himself
once or twice heard odd sounds at night, very like a pack of hounds in
cry; and that once, as he was returning rather late from a hunting
dinner, he had seen a strange figure galloping along this same moor;
but as he was riding rather fast at the time, and in a hurry to get
home, he did not stop to ascertain what it was.
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