Page:Hallowe'en festivities (1903).djvu/120

116 left in a hurry, when they found the train wasn't goin' over the bluff as they'd expected. An' they found, too, when it come light, the body o' the man whose business it was to see to the curve, where it had been hid away after bein' murdered. An' that man was the man whose ghost we had seen.

Yes, sir. He'd come to warn us o' the danger ahead after the men had killed him an' was a-waitin' for us to go over the rocks to destruction. An' he'd saved us.

I found out afterward that there was a lot o' money on board, an' I s'pose the men who tore up the track knew it. So that's my ghoststory, an' it's a true one.

JIMMY BUTLER AND THE OWL. 'Twas in the Summer of '46 that I landed at Hamilton, fresh as a new pratie just dug from the "ould sod," an' wid a light heart an' a heavy bundle I sot off for the township of Buford, tiding a taste of a song, as merry a young fellow as iver took the road. Well, I trudged on an' on, past many a plisint place, pleasin' myself wid the thought that some day I might have a place of my own, wid a world of chickens an' ducks an' pigs an' childer about the door; an' along in the afternoon of the sicond day I got to Buford village. A cousin of me mother's, one Dennis, O'Dowd, lived about sivin miles from there, an' I wanted to make his place that night, so I inquired the way at the tavern, an' was lucky to find a man who was goin' part of the way, an ? would show me the way to find Dennis. Sure he was very kind indade, an' when I got out of his wagon he pointed me through the wood an' tould me to go straight south a mile an' a half, an' the first house would be Dennis's.

"An' you've no time to lose now," said he, "for the sun is low, an' mind you don't get lost in the woods."

"Is it lost now," said I, "that I'd be gittin', an' me uncle as great a navigator as iver steered a ship across the thrackless