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Updated: May 7, 2025
Such was the general belief; and whether it was "the birds of the air," as Solomon saith, or whether it was the beggars and chapmen, occasionally quartered at Howdycraigs, who "carried the matter," is of little importance; but in time the whole of the facts, with the inferences drawn therefrom, reached Nelly's former acquaintances, and then, for some reason which has never been satisfactorily explained, they saw occasion entirely to alter their previous opinion.
The ghost of Howdycraigs, to which his present visiter bore a striking resemblance, rushed back upon his memory, and he would have trembled, but that he did not recollect any bad consequences which followed that memorable event. Thus, in time, even ghosts might fail to terrify, were they to repeat their visits too often.
The proper season for securing this desideratum of the female world was fast wearing away; something, she saw, must of necessity be done; and, thinking that women, like some other commodities, might sell better at a distance than at home, she engaged herself as a servant on the little farm of Howdycraigs a place situated among that portion of the Ochils already noticed.
Eighteen years had nearly elapsed since the period at which the former part of this history concludes; and the Ghost of Howdycraigs was nearly forgotten. Betsy Braikens, who was then only a girl, was now a full-grown woman, who, for the last eight or nine of the above-mentioned years, would not have been irreconcilably offended with a well-looking sweetheart for proposing to make her his wife.
And when they heard that she was engaged to go to Howdycraigs at Martinmas, and that Jock Jervis was engaged to go there also, they said that, "if it hadna been for the witch's ill wisses, they were sure Nelly would mak baith a better sweetheart and a better wife to Jock, than that licht-headed limmer, Lizzy Gimmerton."
In the fulfilment of our promise of "a future story," which we made at the termination of "The Ghost of Howdycraigs," we may premise thus:
The ghost of Gairyburn, however, at first bade fair for being as famous in its day and generation as the ghost of Howdycraigs had been; and doubtless it had succeeded in a less hazardous enterprise. Like the other, its head was tied up in a white handkerchief, its body was carefully wrapped in the folds of an ample winding-sheet.
On the third day from Abernethy Market, Betsy Braikens, in returning from Auchtermuchty, whither she had been on some errand, called at Howdycraigs, "to speer for her cousin, Sandy Crawford, who was the herd laddie, and to tell Nelly Kilgour, of whom she had also some acquaintance, that Grizzy Glaiket had haen a bairn to Geordy Gowkshanks.
Her brother James, who, in the same interval, had arrived at man's estate, had been endeavouring, not very successfully, for some time past to establish himself as a merchant in Perth; and his cousin, Sandy Crawford, whom the reader will recollect as the herd laddie at Howdycraigs, had, by the death of his father, been promoted to be tacksman of Gairyburn; upon which place he resided with his mother.
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