Her Grandfather’s Ghost

by Mary Kyle Dallas

The heroine of this story was a Miss Rebecca Berry, who lived many years ago, and who in her old age used to tell it thus:

“My grandfather thought a great deal of me when I was a child. Whenever he was able to persuade my mother to let me leave home, I came to visit him. I was always glad to come, for no one ever humored me so much. The only thing that ever troubled me was that he constantly told me that I was to be his heiress.

“‘I shall leave everything I have in the world to you, Rebecca,’ he used to say.

“‘Oh! grandfather,’ I would reply, ‘don’t talk of dying. You may outlive all of us, and you can give me whatever you choose that I like; but I would not care to be rich if you were dead.’

“It seemed to me, in those days, as though people might live forever if they tried to do so, and will-making and anticipations of death I dreaded as things that were likely to bring the terrible end on prematurely.

“As long as grandfather said, ‘I shall leave you everything in my will,’ I did not feel so badly. But when one day—the first of a long visit that I paid him—he said: ‘Rebecca, my will is made, and you are a rich woman.’ I was almost frightened out of my senses. I cried long and bitterly and was miserable for days—however, comfort came to me at last, and grandfather never mentioned his will to me again.

“The making of it did not kill him. He lived for twenty years, though he was sixty when he made it—and all sorts of changes happened. My dear parents died, my brother went to India, my sister married and lived in France. I lived with grandfather, was past thirty years of age, and my cousin Gregory had come to the Berry House to live.… Read More