I don't think I smelt pepp'mint the fust time it come. I was a-sittin' in the front basement when it come. I don't know what made me look up, but I done it; an' there, standin' right near the table, was the ghost; though's I said before, I didn't know it for a ghost then. It looked like a boy. Afore I could ask him what he wanted, he stepped up, an' says, sort o' quick and excited-like, "Don't you want to hear me speak my piece?" and he began,
"My name is Norvyle; on the crampin' hills
My father feeds his flock"—
an' a lot more about his folks. When he'd done, he bowed real perlite. When I turned round he'd gone. The next day about the same time, I begun to smell a strong kind o' brimstoney smell, an' I looked up an' there stood the ghost, an' he says real interested: " Don't you want to hear me speak my piece?" an' he started off real glib. [Pause.] I can't reelect what he spoke that time. Bimeby I went to the closet to git somethin' to show him, an' when I got back he was gone.
Ev'ry single arternoon arter that, I begun to smell a sort o' pepp'minty smell, an' in come that boy, walked up to me, an' sort o' excited-like says : "Don't you want to hear me speak my piece?" Then he'd hold out his arm straight an' tell how nobody never heerd a drum nor a fun'ral note the time they buried somebody in an awful hurry. Again he'd start off speechifying about its being a real question arter all whether you hadn't better be, or hadn't better not be. An' there was a loud one where he just insisted that our chains is forged. "Their clankin'," he says, "may be heard on the plains o' Boston." I b'lieve 'twas in one that he kept raying: "Let it come; I repeat it, sir, let it come. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there ain't no peace," an' so on. Real eloquent 'twas. An' I growed proud o' that boy.
I never's long's I live shall forgit the day I found out he wa'n't a boy, a common, ord'nary boy, but a ghost! Well, you can't understand anything I went through then; nobody can't. When I found it out, I was determined
