My Friend Walter

Cousin Walter is the ghost of Sir Walter Raleigh who follows Bess Throckmorton back home to the farm near where Sir Walter once lived, and where her father now finds it increasingly hard to scrape a living. It's hard for Bess to hide her friend Walter when he does strange things like miraculously curing her grandmother or making the horse disappear for a week. When the farm has to be sold and Walter himself has disappeared, Bess nearly loses hope - but Walter has been plotting all along and there's a happy ending. The Dorset lilt of the narrative gives a gentle feel to this unusually-slanted, incident-packed story.