Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/344

322 late; his horse was galloping furiously, and as he left the high road to go into the lane which led to his own house he never stopped to open the gate at the entrance of the lane but cleared it with a bound. As he passed a neighbour’s house, its inmates heard him screaming out, “I will–I will—I will!” and looking out they saw a little old woman in black, with a large straw hat on her head, whom they recognised as old Nannie, seated behind the terrified man on the runaway nag, and clinging to him closely. The farmer’s hat was off, his hair stood on end, as he fled past them, uttering his fearful cry, “I will—I will—I will!” But when the horse reached the farm all was still, for the rider was a corpse!

Mines have ever been supposed to be haunted; nor can we wonder at it considering the many unearthly sounds constantly to be heard there—“the dripping of water down the shafts, the tunnelling of distant passages, the rumbling of trains from some freshly-explored lode,” and all received upon the ear in gloom and often in solitude. The following instance, told by a miner on his sick-bed to his clergyman, is recorded in Communications with the Unseen World (page 121): “The overseer of the mine he had been used to work in (at Whitehaven) for many years, was a Cumberland man; but being found guilty of some unfair proceedings he was dismissed by the proprietors from his post, though employed in an inferior situation. The new overseer was a Northumberland man, who had the burr that distinguishes that county very strongly. To this person the degraded overseer bore the strongest hatred, and was heard to say that some day he would be his ruin. He lived, however, in apparent friendship with him, but one day they were both destroyed together by the firedamp. It was believed in the mine that, preferring revenge to life, the ex-overseer had taken his successor, less acquainted than himself with the localities of the mine, into a place where he knew the firedamp to exist, and that without a safety-lamp; and had thus contrived his destruction. But ever after that time, in the place where the two men perished, their voices might be heard high in dispute, the Northumbrian burr being distinctly audible, and also the well-known pronunciation