"Everybody said so.

Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is often as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience everybody has been wrong so often and it has taken in most instances such a weary while to find out how wrong that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; "but that's no rule" as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.

The dread word Ghost recalls me.

Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my present claim for everybody is that they were so far right. He did."