The Argosy — page 326: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

305 Nelly Dewnils Ghost. THR ARG I8V. Mafchl a, a company all the tme. Such things would sell well, I’m sure, if you’d move a little farther up in the town, and keep a good supply.” Now this was quite an idea, and I soon saw the good sense of it. Will was just leaving on a Lisbon voyage, and I talked it over with him. He saw the sense of it, too, and promised to bring me a stock of fruits when he came back in a month or six weeks. But the trouble was to get a house, with good shop-room, convenient to the Hall and the better-class dwellings that were near it. Jane and I knew every house in the town, and there was not a single one empty that we could afford to take. We talked it over, and wondered what we should do, till at last Jane cried out—‘“‘ Why, Aunt Susan, there’s the old Devitt house, just the thing we want, and I warrant we can get it cheap enough, too; for it has stood idle, going to rack and nun, this many a year.” - “The Devitt house,” said I, and I stopped to think a bit; for, to tell you the truth, the mention of it rather startled me. Everybody said it was haunted, and no one would live in it rent-free. Nearly ten years before, old Devitt died there, the last of his family, and after that it was shut up, and left to the rats and cobwebs. To be sure, it was, as Jane said, the very thing we needed; for old Devitt had been a baker, and used the ground-floor for his shop and bake-rooms ; besides, it had quite a good bit of yard for the children to play in, with plenty of chamber- room for a family twice our size. ‘It is a good house, in a good situation,” said I, as I thought of all this ; “but you know, Jane, people talk of it. I don’t believe there is a soul in all Wyndhurst that could be hired to live there.” “That’s the reason we shall get it at a bargain,” returned Jane, stoutly. ‘‘If we mean to keep a fruit-shop, it is the very place for us.” I'm not a coward myself, and I never believed in any of the foolish stories they had got up about the old place. I knew the sorrowfub story of the family that had lived there last, and I attributed most of the talk about the white figure they had seen flitting through the upper rooms to the pitiful ending of poor Nelly Devitt’s life as a hopeless maniac in those very chambers. You see, the Devitts were comfortable sort of people, with two or three sons and this one daughter, Nelly, of whom they were foolishly fond and proud. She was very pretty, but her beauty brought her no good, poor thing! for she fell into disgrace, and was sent away to the north to her mother’s fnends; for the Devitts were very high in their notions, and strove to hide the shame that her folly had brought upon them. Such things can’t be kept hidden, it seems, and so this was soon the town-talk. Old Lady Wyndhurst had a grandson, the only male heir of all the grand estate, and it was through him and his deceiving promises poor Nelly had been brought to mw, they said. (CO) mn _ \ comicloooks