 Sir Sidney taken fire at the cruel proposition, in all probability the village of Castlewick would never have been built.

The surviving gentleman of this family I now take the liberty of introducing in form to the reader. He had many singularities: one I have already hinted at: another was a fixed aversion to cards and dice; yet he was a strenuous encourager of all athletic sports. He would sometimes pitch the bar himself, and was allowed to be the best bowler at cricket within ten miles. He was an admirer of the arts, and never failed to bring with him from town, at the end of every sessions, a poet, a painter, and a musician, who were obliged—and so indeed were all others who wished for his esteem—to accompany him in the different departments of his duty, as he called the regulation of his little commonwealth. Nay sometimes he would set them to work, on which occasion he enjoyed their awkwardness.
Seeing once the wig of a counsellor catch in the girt of a twisting mill, as he was unhandily turning it round, it afforded no small diversion to the baronet, who facetiously exclaimed,
"My good old friend, you let your learning fly about at a strange rate."

No man was more admired, nor sought less to be so, than Sir Sidney. Even the boobies, with whom he could not mix, because he never swore, gamed,

nor drank pint bumpers, declared he was a gruffish odd sort of a hearty cock. In short, his heart was benevolent, his means were ample, he was in the prime of life, surrounded with hundreds of sincere friends—which is a bold thing to say-respected, valued, esteemed, adored, almost deified, and yet he was not happy. I could tell the reader why, but shall only so far indulge him as to say that, according to Sir Sidney's own account, his unhappiness was occasioned by a phantom he had seen, which had so possessed him, that he could not rest in his bed till he had opened his mind to it:—for, were I to unriddle the whole secret of this ghost, the spirit and the reader's curiosity would vanish together.
I shall therefore collect together all the leading circumstances, that I may the more adroitly introduce the time when, the place where, and the manner how, it appeared. And this has been a privilege to authors and old women time immemorial; a climax having ever been allowed the proper moment to introduce a catastrophe, and the candle's burning blue a signal for the approach
