thed watching many carriages drive up to
No. 252, many of them private, not a few with crests on the door panels,
from all of them descending veiled female figures and men with coat
collars turned up. Then followed curious sounds of music from within,
and those whose houses joined the blank walls of No. 252 became for the
moment popular, for by placing the ear against the wall strange music
could distinctly be heard, and the sound of monotonous chanting voices
now and then. By dawn the last guest would have departed, and for
another year the hotel of Mlle. de Tartas was ominously silent.

Eugene declared that he believed it was a celebration of
"Walpurgisnacht," and certainly appearances favored such a fancy.

"A queer thing about the whole affair is," he said, "the fact that every
one in the street swears that about a month ago, while I was out in
Concarneau for a visit, the music and voices were heard again, just as
when my revered aunt was in the flesh. The house was perfectly empty, as
I tell you, so it is quite possible that the good people were enjoying
an hallucination."

I must acknowledge that these stories did not reassure me; in fact, as
Thursday came near, I began to regret a little my determination to spend
the night in the house. I was too vain to back down, however, and the
perfect coolness of the two doctors, who ran down Tuesday to Meudon to
make a few arrangements, caused me to swear that I would die of fright
before I would flinch. I suppose I believed more or less in ghosts, I am
sure now that I am older I believe in them, there are in fact few things
I can _not_ believe. Two or three inexplicable things had happened to
me, and, although this was before my adventure with Rendel in Paestum, I
had a strong predisposition to believe some things that I could not
explain, wherein I was out of sympathy with the age.

Well, to come to the memorable night of the twelfth of June, we had made
our preparations, and after depositing a big bag inside the doors of No.
252, went across to the Chien Bleu, where Fargeau and Duchesne turned up
promptly, and we sat down to the best dinner Pere Garceau could create.

I remember I hardly felt that the conversation was in good taste. It
began with various stories of Indian fakirs and Oriental jugglery,
matters in which Eugene was curiously well read, swerved to the horrors
of the great Sepoy mutiny, and thus to reminiscences of the
dissecting-room. By this time we had