my bed. It was not to be expected by the most exigeant spectre that I should sit up for him till daylight; and I took up the lamp to go. At the very last moment, however, I was irresistibly impelled to take a look into the Great Hall. I felt I was shrinking from a conscientious discharge of my duty if I left this part of it unfulfilled. So, very much in the same frame of mind as Phillips when she went to her "boodwar," I marched towards the door of the hall. I opened it very silently, partly because I was afraid of the sounds I made myself, and partly because I wanted, if there was a ghost, to see him without his seeing me, though, as I had the light, a moment's reflection would have shown me that would be impossible. I walked straight into the middle of the hall, and turned the light boldly upon all the pictures and tapestry. Everything was still and silent as the grave. I then kept the light fixed upon the other entrance, so that nobody should come in without my seeing it, and walked towards some of the figures in armour to look if anybody was concealed behind them. I had just satisfactorily settled this point when I suddenly heard a deep sigh. My heart seemed to jump at once into my mouth, and I felt as if I should choke; but I put my back against the wall, so as not to be taken unawares, and listened, but not for long. In another moment a long, deep, heavy sigh-so long, so deep, so full of misery, that it almost amounted to a moan; but there was no intonation in it. It was like a stage whisper-so clear, and yet without any other kind of sound than that made by wind.

It seemed very near me, almost at my ear; so near that I turned suddenly round. I found myself actually leaning against the Sclavonian warrior with the battle-axe and the drum. My flesh was now beginning to creep, I felt my hair positively rising, and I wanted to run away, but was afraid to leave

the wall against which I had placed my back, for it seemed a sort of protection. Again a long deep sigh, then another. There is something abominable in sighs. They seem a sort of sound that it does not require a regular body to make. A pair of lungs is all that is necessary to sigh with; a mouth is quite superfluous. One might sigh through a hole in one's throat, or without a head at all for the matter of that. Then there was a sort of catch in one of the sighs that was particularly disagreeable, as if the ghost had been interrupted in his misery, and then it had been suddenly very much increased. I was still hesitating what to do, when the stillness which had succeeded the last sigh was followed by a muffled sound of beating or thumping, very low and regular, and seeming to echo all round the room, but to come from no particular part of it. As it grew louder my fears rose to such a pitch that all my resolution vanished. I rushed at the door leading to the drawing-room, which I banged after me, but failed to shut out the sound which seemed to pursue me through the drawing-room and along the glass passage, with its increasing volume still ringing in my ears. Into bed, dressed, and just as I was, and with my head under the bed clothes, I was still unable to shut it out. A pressure on my shoulder made me start with a scream of terror-overtaken at last, my bed not even a refuge! it was too horrible!

The thought had hardly flashed across me when Olga's gentle voice reassured me. She was shaking from head to foot; the sounds from the castle had been loud enough to wake her up, and now as we tremblingly clasped each other we could hear them dying away. The loud drum roll was subsiding into the muffled murmur I had heard at first, and by degrees it ceased altogether.

The next morning Phillips came to me with the triumphant intelligence that all the servants had been

roused by the noises in the castle, and that her story, which I had affected to disbelieve, had thus received the most satisfactory confirmation. Poor Phillips! I felt I owed her some apology for the apparent scepticism with which I had treated her story, and admitted to her that I had also heard the sounds-in fact, had passed a very uneasy night in consequence. This seemed to afford her great comfort and consolation, though she relapsed into disappointment when she found that I steadily refused to admit that the sounds in question could possibly be caused by supernatural agency. Notwithstanding all which very brave language, my nerves were so much shaken by the incidents of this dreadful night, that I could scarcely bring myself to enter the Great Hall even by day, and our evening sittings in the drawingroom were by no means protracted to so late an hour as they had formerly been. Having unlimited confidence in the salutary effects of a great deal of exercise in the open air upon the nervous system, I devoted myself to the destruction of hares, and for some days coursed so vehemently, that a new couple of greyhounds, which the bailiff had bought to relieve his own, were fairly worked off their legs. Still I was as perpetually haunted by the desire of discovering something more about the ghosts as the castle was by those uncanny beings. For some nights I lay awake, listening in vain for sounds, until, at last, one night as I lay wondering whether they would ever come again, the distant roll gradually swelling and as gradually falling broke the midnight stillness. It was not nearly so loud as upon the former occasion, and so far from frightening me, seemed this time rather to inspire me with courage. It was on a Saturday, just a fortnight after my last adventure, and I listened and calmly speculated upon the mysterious sound. I had been reading rather a heavy book, in which, nevertheless, I had been

deeply interested; for, although young and giddy, I was excessively fond of study, and the repose of country life had suggested to me the expediency of beginning a course of serious reading and following it up. My lamp was burning brightly, every corner of the room was lighted, Olga and all the servants slept between me and the castle, altogether, my nerves felt so strong and steady, that I quite wondered why I had experienced such terror on the previous occasion; so I once again resolved to fathom the mystery, and this time I determined that not the whole misery of the universe concentrated into one sigh, nor the tattoo roll of all the armies of Europe concentrated into one drum, should drive me from the Great Hall. Having, as upon the first night of Phillips's adventure, arrived at this irrevocable decision, I turned round and went peaceably to sleep.

The first thing which my sisterin-law asked me next morning was whether I had heard the sounds in the night. On my admitting that I had, she said that she had not felt so frightened as upon the last occasion, and remarked that she supposed in time we should get quite accustomed to them. I told her I had already so far overcome my original dread, that I had determined in my own mind to make another nocturnal experience, and proposed to her to join me. However brave one may be individually, a companion on such occasions is always an immense support. my great delight she readily consented to my proposal. I suggested that we should not wait until the next Saturday night, but try at once, and keep on making experiments every night during the week; by these means, if nothing was seen or heard, we should have become accustomed to the loneliness of the Great Hall, and be better able to face the dangers of the fatal Saturday. I am bound to say that we passed the whole of this day in a fever of excitement and anticipation. I went half-a-dozen times into the Great

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Hall, impelled thither by a fascination which was quite irresistible. I gazed at all the pictures, examined all the panelling, ascended the massive staircase, which nevertheless creaked even with my light weight, and became familiar with every object which a heated imagination could possibly turn into a ghost. Gaunt figures in armour, with a dim light upon them, are especially ghost-like and supernatural. The bars of their visors always look like long teeth, and they make a nasty rattle when you touch them, extremely disagreeable in the dark. I determined that I should allow my mind to rest on none of these things when I came at night with Olga. Indeed, I tried to take one warrior to pieces, on purpose to feel on intimate terms with him, and succeeded so far that I got his helmet off, and could not get it on again; so, as a piece of bravado, I put it under his arm, and made him look more ghastly than ever. Then I went back to the drawing-room, and by the time ten o'clock struck I had worked myself up into such a recklessly defiant mood, that I felt almost intoxicated with excitement. Olga caught the infection. We could scarcely restrain our impatience till the moment came to dismiss the servants then we jumped up and waltzed round the room, a sort of war-dance of triumph and defiance. Then we lighted every candle, and went into the billiard-room and lighted it up too, careless of what the servants would suppose,-laughing, indeed, at the terror which the unusual illumination would inspire, and which would certainly be attributed to a posse of debauched ghosts; then we played a noisy game of billiards,—all which, be it remembered, was merely a form of Dutch courage. We were both by this time in our secret souls excessively terrified. Both would will ingly have danced off to bed instead of round the billiard-table; but our honour was at stake, and we kept up appearances magnificently. At

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last the midnight hour struck, and, arming ourselves each with a cue in one hand and a candle in the other, we marched defiantly towards the Great Hall.

The first thing I saw was my friend the warrior whom I had left with his head under his arm, glaring at me with his black, ghastly cavern of a mouth and hollow eyesockets; but, to my horror and dismay, his head was back again upon his shoulders. As none of the servants would have ventured into the Hall since the comparatively late hour that I had last visited it, I was driven to the unpleasant conclusion that this mailed knight had either put on his own head, or had got an equally unearthly friend to put it on for him. I felt my courage already giving way, so I laughed and talked boisterously, and rapped his helmet soundly with my cue, as I told the story in a loud tone to Olga. She was at the other end of the room, tapping the panelling with her cue, as she laughingly said, loud enough to drown the sound of the ghost's drum. We seemed both penetrated with the conviction that our only chance of safety lay in making as much noise as possible, so I began to tap the panels on my side of the room also. At that moment, the most piercing scream I ever heard issue from mortal throat burst from Olga; her candle dropped with a crash, and before I could look round she tore wildly past me, screaming, "Fly! fly! save yourself!" I needed no further admonition. Never turning my head, I rushed after her to the passage leading to the drawing-room, my candle also going out, and in we both burst to the brilliantly lighted room, pale, panting, and exhausted. Our first care was to double-lock the door by which we had just entered; and as, in order to regain our bedrooms, it was necessary to traverse the glass passage, now dark, we rested for a minute while I lighted my candle, and Olga took another out of the candelabra. This gave me time to think that a

retreat to the cottage, after all my resolutions, without even knowing what had happened, would be ignominious, so I implored Olga to sit down and calm herself, and give me some reason for her extravagant alarm. I had taken the precaution to provide sundry restoratives in case of our needing them, and in a few moments she had comparatively regained her tranquillity. All she could say was, that as she was tapping the panel on which was painted the Sclavonian warrior, the cue was suddenly drawn out of her hand by some invisible influence. She had not let it drop, nor had she brought it back with her. There was no denying the fact; the cue had vanished-but how, remained a mystery. When she felt it being pulled from her hand she screamed, dropped the light, turned and fled, and she could give me no further information upon the subject. Meantime we sat and listened. Not a sound could we hear except the murmur of the wind and the rustling of the pine branches which overhung the window. Feeling that this silence would unnerve us, and reluctant to yield to Olga's entreaties to go to the cottage, I proposed that we should return to the billiard-room, lock both the doors, and play a game of billiards. A ghost would scarcely be bold enough to enter a room in which there were fifteen candles burning; and if the sounds were as loud as usual, we would sit there and listen to them safely. After some hesitation, my companion consented to this arrangement, and we went through the form of knocking the balls about, without, however, being able to get rid for an instant of the one thought uppermost in both our minds. Every now and then, by mutual consent, we stopped and listened, but not a sound was audible. I was on the point of proposing another visit to the Hall, when the bang of a distant door checked the words as they rose to my lips, and made us both start and tremble. Then again profound stillness.

It was now nearly two o'clock, but as I had quite made up my mind not to go to bed without one more attempt at unravelling the mystery, I determined first quietly to go over in my mind the events which had occurred up to this point, hoping that somehow I might hit upon the clue. As I did so, it flashed across me that upon the occasion of my first visit I heard the sighs when I was standing on the side of the room near the picture of the Sclavonian warrior, and that as I leant my back against it they seemed nearer and louder. This then might be the haunted spot, if any one place in this "possessed" old building was more haunted than another, for exactly here it was that Olga had lost her cue. It was a sort of comfort getting some definite locality to fix upon for investigation, and a comfort to have a distinct reason for revisiting the Hall-my distinct reason being that I wanted to see whether the cue was lying upon the floor, or had really, as Olga maintained, been spirited away altogether. My curiosity on this point was so great that I firmly resisted all her endeavours to dissuade me from going back. I finally promised, however, that we should only go as far as the Hall door, this time on tiptoe; that we should open it gently and look in, and be satisfied, if we saw the cue lying on the floor, to leave it there without venturing further; if not, to rest content with our experiences for the night, and put off our investigations as to what had become of the cue to some future occasion. This being decided upon, we once more screwed up our courage to the sticking point, and returned to the drawing-room, where everything was still lighted, and stayed for a moment to listen. To my dismay and regret, for I saw my companion's resolution would fail her, we distinctly heard a sort of shuffling sound, as of some one crossing the Hall in slippers. At this time I felt such intense anxiety to know what had become of the cue that I was resolved to go on alone

if Olga would not come with me; and when I saw her sink back almost fainting into a chair, I felt it would be cruel of me to urge her further. Indeed, at the moment she was so frightened that she was unable even to go back to the cottage, much less to the Hall. I therefore crept cautiously on by myself, and, before opening the door into the Hall, leant my ear against it and listened. All silent. I put my hand gently on the old-fashioned latch, which, fortunately, I could turn without noise, and pushed the door softly open. The Sclavonian warrior hung on the wall to the left as I entered, and as the door also opened back into the Hall on the same side, I found I should be obliged either to fling it well back or advance into the room in order to have a view of the floor at the foot of the picture, where I expected to find the cue lying. I should remark that, on passing through the drawing-room, it occurred to me to take, instead of a candle, a readinglamp with a very strong reflector, which, though somewhat heavy, could be made to throw a bright light. Before pushing the door wide open I gave my lamp an extra twist; then, with every fibre strung, I took one bold step into the room, and turned the lamp full on the left-hand wall. What I then saw fairly rooted me to the spot with amazement and dismay. The Sclavonian warrior had utterly vanished, and in his room, or I should rather say in a room, there appeared a bed, a table with a loaf of bread upon it, a chair, a pair of jack-boots, and a sword hanging above them. For an instant I felt dizzy with bewilderment, then turned and fled. I was more thoroughly frightened than if a legion of drumming ghosts had marched into the Hall. The dénouement was so utterly unexpected, so terribly real, so exactly the reverse of supernatural, that the very contrast was a shock. Spectral figures in white robes, or even the Sclavonian warrior beating his own drum, I could have borne; but a bed which

had evidently just been occupied, for the clothes were all tumbled, a pair of jack-boots probably just pulled off, and a half-eaten loaf of bread, were sights infinitely more alarming. I felt that the occupant of the mysterious chamber must be the sort of person who would murder me if he caught me; and my tell-tale face as I rushed through the drawing-room required no explanation. Olga was sufficiently recovered to fly after me, and once more, breathless and exhausted, we reached my bedroom. Here I explained to my sister-in-law what I had seen, and we spent the remaining hours till daylight in accounting for the ghostly sounds, and in vague conjectures as to the identity of the individual who produced them. The servants were somewhat astonished not only to find us up at the earliest hour in the morning, but to receive an order to send the white-headed steward to us. Meantime Mrs Phillips had been made acquainted with our discovery, which she communicated in a tongue of her own invention to the rest of the household, so that when the steward came we were followed by the whole establishment to the Great Hall. To my astonishment another change had taken place since my last visit. The Sclavonian warrior was no longer there, it is true, but no more were the bed, or the table, or the chair, or the big boots, or the loaf of bread, or the sword. Everything had disappeared except the room, and into that we entered. It was built into the solid wall, here nine feet thick. The panel occupied by the warrior had been five feet by seven, and this was the size of the entrance to the room. The dimensions of it were as follows: eight feet in breadth, twelve feet in length, seven in height the floor was one foot higher than that of the hall. It was now quite empty, though the stains of liquid spilt on the floor showed it to have been recently occupied. After some difficulty we