THERE was a graveyard on the top of the hill on our farm, above our house. All of my relatives are buried there, and many of the neighbors. Briers and weeds had grown up about the tombstones. I used to pull them away and read the epitaphs on the stones. I recall one:
"Remember Friend, as You Pass Bye,
as You are Now, so Once Was I.
As I am Now, so You Must Be.
Prepare to Die and Follow me."
I do not remember who was buried there, but it does not matter. The epitaphs were not usually selected by the deceased, but by surviving relatives, and they did not always express the character or views of the one who slept beneath them. I early became acquainted with ghost stories and have been thrilled at their recital by some calling neighbor, around the old fireplace at night. Night is the only time that a ghost story should be told. A ghost story told in the daytime never has an appreciative audience. There have been many good people who have lived and died in the belief that they had seen ghosts. My father did not believe in them, but my mother would have believed in them if it had not been for the influence of my father. I will never forget old John Ainsley's ghost story of Richard Duryea. Duryea lived alone in a large white house on the Dean road. He had been a sailor and was believed to have been a pirate. In those days a man's wickedness was estimated by his profanity, and by that test Duryea was a very wicked man. He never went to meeting and never mixed with the neighbors. He had boxes and relics of the sea and his profanity was dreadful. He used to be heard singing "Three Dead Men and a Bottle of Rum," and another sea song about walking the plank. The few preachers who went to see him barely escaped without assault, and from all of this the opinion prevailed that he was in league with the devil, and he was avoided and shunned by all. But he was taken ill and the old woman neighbor who occasionally went to his house to rid it up, reported his illness, and old John Ainsley and Andrew Kriner went to see about it. They found him very ill, and insisted on a doctor, but he would not have one. The night he died Ainsley and Kriner were sitting up with him. It was a warm June night and they sat in a room adjoining his. The door into his room was open, and the door opening to the porch was open. They were dozing when, just as the clock struck twelve, they were startled by seeing a black animal with sharp eyes and quite a large body and short legs pass in at the open door, pass through their room and into Duryea's room. They heard Duryea cry out in great fear. They rushed into his room, meeting the animal coming out, but Duryea was dead. Ainsley believed that the animal was the devil after old Duryea.
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