Sometimes they appeared, as it were, intermittently, but now and again
they would stay quite a long time.
As long as he could remember, Timmy had been aware of what Nanna
expressed by the phrase "things that were not there," and he was so
accustomed to the phenomena that it did not impress his own mind as
anything very much out of the way, or strange.
Dr. O'Farrell had always shown a keen interest in Timmy's alleged visions
and presentiments. Like so many country doctors of the old school, he
was a man not only of great natural shrewdness, but of considerable
intellectual curiosity, and, from his point of view, by far the most
inexplicable of the little boy's assertions had concerned a long vanished
building which had stood, for something like three centuries, close to
the parish church, right on the main street of the village.
One Easter Sunday, Timmy, coming out of church, had excitedly exclaimed
that he saw to his right a house where no house had been up to yesterday.
His sisters had laughed at him and his mother had snubbed him. But when
Janet had told Dr. O'Farrell of her little boy's latest and most peculiar
claim to having seen something which was not there, the doctor had gone
home and looked up an old county history, to find that up to Waterloo
year there had still been standing in the pretty little hamlet of
Beechfield, a small Elizabethan manor-house which had figured in the
Titus Oates conspiracy.
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