The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain

Everybody said so.Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true.

Everybody is, often, as likely tobe wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken,in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to befallible.

Everybody may sometimes be right; "but that's no rule," as the ghost of Giles Scroggins saysin the ballad.The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.Everybody said he looked like a haunted man.

The extent of my present claim for everybody is, thatthey were so far right.

He did.Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinablygrim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed,about his face,-as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beatingof the great deep of humanity,-but might have said he looked like a haunted man?Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve,retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or oflistening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave, with a natural fulness and melodyin it which he seemed to set himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of ahaunted man?