“Rest!” said the same voice that had plagued them through the night, “rest!—­what is rest?  Boggart knows no rest.”

“Plague tak’ thee for a Boggart!” said the farmer next morning, on hearing the strange story from his children:  “Plague tak’ thee! can thee not let the poor things be quiet?  But I’ll be up with thee, my gentleman:  so tak’ th’ chamber an’ be hang’d to thee, if thou wilt.  Jack and little Robert shall sleep o’er the cart-house, and Boggart may rest or wriggle as he likes when he is by himsel’.”

The move was accordingly made, and the bed of the brothers transferred to their new sleeping-room over the cart-house, where they remained for some time undisturbed; but his Boggartship having now fairly become the possessor of a room at the farm, it would appear, considered himself in the light of a privileged inmate, and not, as hitherto, an occasional visitor, who merely joined in the general expression of merriment.  Familiarity, they say, breeds contempt; and now the children’s bread and butter would be snatched away, or their porringers of bread and milk-would be dashed to the ground by an unseen hand; or if the younger ones were left alone but for a few minutes, they were sure to be found screaming with terror on the return of their nurse.  Sometimes, however, he would behave himself kindly.  The cream was then churned, and the pans and kettles scoured without hands.  There was one circumstance which was remarkable;—­the stairs ascended from the kitchen, a partition of boards covered the ends of the steps, and formed a closet beneath the staircase.  From one of the boards of this partition a large round knot was accidentally displaced; and one day the youngest of the children, while playing with the shoe-horn, stuck it into this knot-hole.  Whether or not the aperture had been formed by the Boggart as a peep-hole to watch the motions of the family, I cannot pretend to say.  Some thought it was, for it was called the Boggart’s peep-hole; but others said that they had remembered it long before the shrill laugh of the Boggart was heard in the house.  However this may have been, it is certain that the horn was ejected with surprising precision at the head of whoever put it there; and either in mirth or in anger the horn was darted forth with great velocity, and struck the poor child over the ear.

There are few matters upon which parents feel more acutely than that of the maltreatment of their offspring; but time, that great soother of all things, at length familiarised this dangerous occurrence to every one at the farm, and that which at the first was regarded with the utmost terror, became a kind of amusement with the more thoughtless and daring of the family.  Often was the horn slipped slyly into the hole, and in return it never failed to be flung at the head of some one, but most commonly at the person who placed it there.  They were used to call this pastime, in the provincial dialect, “laking wi’