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And thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not know it. "Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said.
It was called the Lyng House, and had been probably built two or three generations back, and now was occupied by a person of some consideration viz., Thomas Middleton, Archdeacon of Suffolk, and brother of William Middleton, then Bishop of Norwich. This house was on the east side of the road, and the road leading up to it had a name, and was called the Hutgong.
At last we came to a long spur of high ground that runs out into the fen, about midway between Bridgwater and Taunton; and there is the village they call Lyng, where we most hoped to hear good news. The day was drawing to sunset, and we would hasten; so Heregar went one way and I another, each to distant cottages that we saw.
Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire.
When we drew nigh to him he bade us get on the bank; we did so and followed him some way, midst furze and lyng. All of a sudden he exclaimed, "There it is!" We looked and saw a large figure standing on a pedestal. On going up to it we found it to be a Hercules leaning on his club, indeed a copy of the Farnese Hercules, as we gathered from an inscription in Latin partly defaced.
"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives such depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful." The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past.
"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it." Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied face. "Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable interval. "Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!" "Me just now?"
The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.
Of the author of Rhodon and Iris, as the play was called, little is known beyond the dates of his birth and death, 1600 and 1671, and the bare facts that he was at one time connected in the capacity of tutor or chaplain with the family of Sir William Paston of Oxmead, and after the restoration held the living of Lyng in Norfolk.
At the E. hamlet is a small modern memorial church, with a spire . The W. village, which is traversed by the Brue, has a church which was rebuilt in 1846, and has undergone several renovations since. Lympsham, a parish 6 m. Lyng, a village 1/2 m. W. of Athelney Station, situated on the Tone. One of the bells dates from 1609. The "isle" of Athelney, with Alfred's monument, is in this parish.
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