“GIVE a dog a bad name and you might as well hang him,” so runs the saw, and it is found to be applicable to many affairs of our everyday life. In the case I am about to relate the house known as the “Grange,” situated in a rather lonely spot on the high road running north from Carlisle, and about two and a half miles from that town was a monument to the truth of the adage. The house was a very old one, dating back probably before Queen Elizabeth’s time, and it had known many vicissitudes of fortune. It had for a period of something like half a century been in the possession of and tenanted by a somewhat eccentric gentleman and his wife named Shrapston. Mr. Shrapston lived to be nearly ninety, and his wife was eighty when she predeceased him ten years before he was called upon to lay down
