the life
out of both white and black.

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two
at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree
dak-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very
lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a
house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses "repeats" on
autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice
accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept
by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers'
Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose
furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with
the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur
possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is
something--not fever--wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older
Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies
along their main thoroughfares.

Some of the dak-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little
cemeteries in their compound--witnesses to the "changes and chances
of this mortal life" in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the
Northwest. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in.
They are generally very old, always dirty, while the _khansamah_ is as
ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the
long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with
him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and
says that when he was in that Sahib's service not a _khansamah_ in the
Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and
fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.

In these dak-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when
found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to
live in dak-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three
nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in
Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an
inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at
the threshold to give welcome. I lived in "converted" ones--old houses
officiating as dak-bungalows--where nothing was in its proper place
and there wasn't even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand
palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as
un