It wasn’t till our celebrations were over that we noticed that anything was wrong in Fairfield. ’Twas shoemaker who told me first about it one morning at the ‘Fox and Grapes.’ ‘You know my great great-uncle?’ he said to me.

‘You mean Joshua, the quiet lad,’ I answered, knowing him well.

‘Quiet!’ said shoemaker indignantly. ‘Quiet you call him, coming home at three o’clock every morning as drunk as a magistrate and waking up the whole house with his noise.’

‘Why, it can’t be Joshua!’ I said, for I knew him for one of the most respectable young ghosts in the village.

‘Joshua it is,’ said shoemaker; ‘and one of these nights he’ll find himself out in the street if he isn’t careful.’

This kind of talk shocked me, I can tell you, for I don’t like to hear a man abusing his own family, and I could hardly believe that a steady youngster like Joshua had taken to drink. But just then in came butcher Aylwin in such a temper that he could hardly drink his beer. ‘The young puppy! the young puppy!’ he kept on saying; and it was some time before shoemaker and I found out that he was talking about his ancestor that fell at Senlac.

‘Drink?’ said shoemaker hopefully, for we all like company in our misfortunes, and butcher nodded grimly.

‘The young noodle,’ he said, emptying his tankard.

Well, after that I kept my ears open, and it was the same story all over the village. There was hardly a young man among all the ghosts of Fairfield who didn’t roll home in the small hours of the morning the worse for liquor. I used to wake up in the night and hear them stumble past my house, singing outrageous songs. The worst of it was that we couldn’t keep the scandal to ourselves, and the folk at Greenhill began to talk of ‘sodden Fairfield’ and taught their children to sing a song about us:

Sodden Fairfield, sodden Fairfield, has no use for bread-and-butter,

Rum for breakfast, rum for dinner, rum for tea, and rum for supper!

We are easy-going in our village, but we didn’t like that.

Of course we soon found out where the young fellows went to get the drink, and landlord was terribly cut up that his tenant should have turned out so badly, but his wife wouldn’t hear of parting with the brooch, so that he couldn’t give the Captain notice to quit. But as time went on, things grew from bad to worse, and at all hours of the day you would see those young reprobates sleeping it off on the village green. Nearly every afternoon a ghost-wagon used to jolt down to the ship with a lading of rum, and though the older ghosts seemed inclined to give the Captain’s hospitality the go-by, the youngsters were neither to hold nor to bind.

So one afternoon when I was taking my nap I heard a knock at the door, and there was parson looking very serious, like a man with a job before him that he didn’t altogether relish. ‘I’m going down to talk to the Captain about all this drunkenness in the village, and I want you to come with me,’ he said straight out.

I can’t say that I fancied the visit much myself, and I tried to hint to parson that as, after all, they were only a lot of ghosts, it didn’t very much matter.

‘Dead or alive, I’m responsible for their good conduct,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to do my duty and put a stop to this continued disorder. And you are coming with me, John Simmons.’ So I went, parson being a persuasive kind of man.