Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/120

110 April 6th; but carters go to their new place on the 5th and take charge of their horses that night, and the next day take a horse and cart to fetch their families. Ten years ago we moved from near Wareham to Huish Farm on Baron Hambro's estate, near Abbey Milton. The farmer was Mr. Tett, and between the day when my husband went and the following when he fetched us there Mr. Tett died. We stopped on, however, and after six months took service there with Mr. Wallis, a bailiff under the Baron. We had a cottage close to the stables where the horses for both ploughs were kept, and where were kept, too, the horses of old William Vachor, another ploughman. But after a while the bailiff moved these horses to Long Close, and Vachor did not like it. The last Sunday his horses were in our stable, instead of going home he stayed in an empty cottage close to our house till he could 'reck up,' or fill the racks, which is done between seven and eight o'clock at night. In the evening, about six o'clock, a great noise was heard in the stable, just as if the horses had broken loose—there were sixteen of them—but nothing was to be seen when my husband and sons went in. On their way they passed William Vachor coming out of the empty cottage, and he said he had been asleep. This went on at different times. I have heard it at ten o'clock at night. Early one morning a labourer coming over the fields heard it and asked what could be the matter. My husband and sons have heard it in the tallet, or hayloft, when they were in the stable. The noise was out of all reason, and people began to say that old Tett had come back again.

"One morning my son George, then fifteen years old, taking up some horses at ten o'clock, heard something going over the straw and pounding on the floor. He took up a besom and tried to strike it, but it was too quick for him and got away. He could only see that something was there, but could not tell what. Two or three months after these noises had begun, my husband and sons came home one day for dinner at two o'clock, as carters do; and Albert, aged seventeen, and George ran into the stable, and looking about George saw old William Vachor, who used to stable his horses there, in the dust-hole, or bin where chop and chaff is kept. As soon as he saw the boys, he passed them quickly and vanished through a small hole in the window over the door, no bigger than the glasses of a pair of spectacles. Albert did not see