with its quadrangle shut in by a thatched
mud-wall, within which quadrangle the old women
used to sit weaving. A ghost haunted this
workhouse during the old French war. At
its first appearance it took the ambiguous form
of a "roaring jackass." It was first seen by a
discharged soldier on tramp, a wild drunken
fellow who was supposed to have broken every
commandment, and to have many crimes upon
his conscience. People had shunned him as of
the race of Cain, an outcast doomed to an old
age of beggary and wretchedness. The house
being unusually full, this fellow had a bed made
up for him in a lonely blind hole under the
stairs, in some out-of-the-way corner at the end
of one of the wards. One morning, when the
paupers awoke, they found him shivering with
fear and almost paralysed. The stubbly hair on
his vicious bullet head was standing on end; his
grisly scars looked livid with blood that refused
to circulate in the congealing veins. The old
Peninsular soldier had seen a ghost—had been
visited by a spirit, probably an evil one. "What
was it? What did it do?" asked a hundred
voices. Soldier shaken up, and putting himself
together, affirmed the ghost to have come stumping
down the ward at midnight on three legs—
three hoofish legs; and that then a voice like that
of a roaring jackass had come bellowing in at the
grating of the blind hole where he slept. Horrible
nightmare. Time after time it came. Investigations
were made, magistrates sat upon the
matter, natural history men discussed the possibility
of roaring jackasses; the workhouse, the
town, was in an uproar.

All this time an officer of the house kept
racking his brains and puzzling his keen wits.
Going one evening through the female ward,
he observed that the wall which divided the male
from the female inmates ran near the soldier's
sleeping kennel. Moreover, he noticed that an
old woman named Sairey Lane often walked about
with a stick, and tapped the wall sometimes as
she walked. He watched closer and closer, until
he all but established that it was this old woman
who had simulated the ghost—that Sairey Lane
and no other was the roaring jackass. After
much trouble, the old woman confessed that she
had come night after night to the grate of the
blind hole, and roared and brayed there in order
to induce the soldier's conversion. The greater
his terror, the more supreme her satisfaction.
The only drawback on the roaring jackass was
its discovery. Once relieved from that incubus,
the soldier, contemptuous henceforward of the
supernatural, probably went on ripening for the
gallows with tremendous rapidity.

There was another haunted house in Salisbury,
in my young days—a large, old-fashioned
mansion near the Green Croft, on the old London-
road. It had belonged in the time of James the
First to wicked Lord Audley, that infamous man
who perished on the gallows after a life stained by
every vice. Old prints still exist representing the
James the First people in their bolstered sleeves
and hose, and with large ribbon roses on their
the fashion then was, witnessing Lord
Audley's death. The house afterwards belonged
to Sir Giles Estcourt, then to the Wyndhams,
and lastly, if I remember right, it was turned into
an ecclesiastical college. The first time I was
shown the place (as a child), there was, I remember,
a three-cocked-hat hanging up in one
of the windows, and I attached a mysterious
importance to this accidental circumstance, surmising
it, of course, to be Lord Audley's hat, and
no one else's. The ghost story ran, that on one
occasion, when the wicked owner of the house
sat revelling and gambling on a Sunday, blaspheming
God and cursing man, a strange black
dog, like the dog in the Isle of Man mythology,
appeared, with supernatural concomitants, entering
and departing suddenly and unaccountably.
From that moment the cards turned against the
blasphemer, the dice fell amiss. With every card
down went oak woods, farm-houses, and country
mansions; his luck never changed; the sinner lost
in that one black-dog evening, his whole estates.

In my younger days,people had more character
than they have now. They rejoiced in their own
eccentricities and peculiarities, regardless of any
one. The great lion of our neighbourhood was
that dark and mysterious man, Beckford, the
author of "Vathek." Beckford, when he came
of age after a long minority, had a million
of ready money, and one hundred thousand
and five pounds a year. The Earl of Chatham
was a visitor at his mother's house, William
Pitt was his playmate. He was educated
as a prince should be educated. Mozart taught
him music, Cozens painting; Sir William
Chambers, the builder of Somerset House, architecture.
He learned the chief European and
Oriental languages; he made the grand tour as a
monarch might make it; he saw all the great
celebrities of Europe; he mixed in the highest
society at every court. He returned home, but
dark rumours began to blight his name. He flew
to Portugal, and there lived a life of shameless
luxury. He returned a forlorn misanthrope,
and lived unseen by any, shut up within his own
park wall, and shunnea by his neighbours.

Whenever this strange person went to London,
he used to drive through Salisbury with four
horses at a furious pace, to express his contempt
and hatred for the town and its inhabitants.
There are many persons still living near Salisbury
who remember hearing the great tower
that Beckford built, falling. The only person
hurt was a carpenter, who, putting up a looking-
glass at the time, was struck off his ladder by
the tremenduous rush of air.

In those days, Salisbury abounded in eccentric people.
There was Reed the artist: a wild-
eyed, long-haired man, who used to race through
the streets like a flying Mercury, on his way
to the schools where he taught drawing. The
great Goethe had mentioned his etchings with
respect. He used to have visions, and believed
thoroughly in his own genius. His celebrated
picture was one of some flounders not a
popular subject. Reed professed to be a great
musician, and used to make most hideous faces
during service at the cathedral, to show his
uncontrollable admiration of certain passages
in the anthems.