He would come to us, with his hoe in his hand, and
as we sat perched, like a row of swallows, on the rail of the fence,
in the mellow twilight of a summer evening, he would tell us such
fearful stories, accompanied by such awful rollings of his white eyes,
that we were almost afraid of our own footsteps as we returned home
afterwards in the dark.
Poor old Pompey! many years are past since he died, and went to keep
company with the ghosts he was so fond of talking about. He was buried
in a comer of his own little potato-patch; the plough soon passed over
his grave, and levelled it with the rest of the field, and nobody
thought any more of the gray-headed negro. By a singular chance, I was
strolling in that neighbourhood several years afterwards, when I had
grown up to be a young man, and I found a knot of gossips speculating
on a skull which had just been turned up by a ploughshare. They of
course determined it to be the remains of some one that had been
murdered, and they had raked up with it some of the traditionary tales
of the haunted house. I knew it at once to be the relic of poor
Pompey, but I held my tongue; for I am too considerate of other
people's enjoyment, ever to mar a story of a ghost or a murder.
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