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Lancasters were insulted, as their servant had been: but
their justification was not long delayed. On the Midsummer
eve of the fearful 1745, twenty-six persons, expressly
summoned by the family, saw all that had been seen before,
and more. Carriages were now interspersed with the troops;
and every body knew that no carriages ever had been, or
could be, on the summit of Souter Fell. The multitude was
beyond imagination; for the troops filled a space of
half-a-mile, and marched quickly till night hid them,- still
marching. There was nothing vaporous or indistinct about the
appearance of these spectres. So real did they seem that
some of the people went up, the next morning, to look for
the hoof-marks of the horses; and awful it was to them to
find not one foot-print on heather or grass. The witnesses
attested the whole story on oath before a magistrate; and
fearful were the expectations held by the whole country-side
about the coming events of the Scotch rebellion. It now came
out that two other persons had seen something of the sort in
the interval, viz., in 1743,- but had concealed it to escape
the insults to which their neighbours were subjected. Mr.
Wren, of Wilton Hall, and his farm-servant, saw, one summer
evening, a man and a dog on the mountain, pursuing some
horses along a place so steep that a horse could hardly, by
any possibility, keep a footing on it. Their speed was
prodigious, and their disappearance at the south end of the
fell so rapid, that Mr. Wren and the servant went up, the
next morning, to find the body of the man who must have been
killed. Of man, horse, or dog, they found not a trace: and
they came
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