e different people, in the course of as many
days--or rather nights--saw, or professed to have seen, the apparition
of Frederick Massingbird.

One of them was Master Cheese. He was one night coming home from paying
a professional visit--in slight, straightforward cases Jan could trust
him--when he saw by the roadside what appeared to be a man standing up
under the hedge, as if he had taken his station there to look at the
passers-by.

"He's up to no good," quoth Master Cheese to himself. "I'll go and
dislodge the fellow."

Accordingly Master Cheese turned off the path where he was walking, and
crossed the waste bit--only a yard or two in breadth--that ran by the
side of the road. Master Cheese, it must be confessed, did not want for
bravery; he had a great deal rather face danger of any kind than hard
work; and the rumour about Fred Massingbird's ghost had been rare nuts
for him to crack. Up he went, having no thought in his head at that
moment of ghosts, but rather of poachers.

"I say, you fellow----" he was beginning, and there he stopped dead.

He stopped dead, both in step and tongue. The figure, never moving,
never giving the faintest indication that it was alive, stood there like
a statue. Master Cheese looked in its face, and saw the face of the late
Frederick Massingbird.

It is _not_ pleasant to come across a dead man at moonlight--a man whose
body has been safely reposing in the ground ever so long ago. Master
Cheese did not howl as Dan Duff had done. He set off down the road--he
was too fat to propel himself over or through the hedge, though that was
the nearest way--he took to his heels down the road, and arrived in an
incredibly short space of time at home, bursting into the surgery and
astonishing Jan and the surgery boy.

"I say, Jan, though, haven't I had a fright?"

Jan, at the moment, was searching in the prescription-book. He raised
his eyes, and looked over the counter. Master Cheese's face had turned
white, and drops of wet were pouring off it--in spite of his bravery.

"What have you been at?" asked Jan.

"I saw the thing they are talking about, Jan. It _is_ Fred
Massingbird's."

Jan grinned. That Master Cheese's fright was genuine, there could be no
mistaking, and it amused Jan excessively.

"What had you been taking?" asked he, in his incredulity.

"I had taken nothing," retorted Master Cheese, who did not like the
ridicule. "I had not had the opportunity of taking anything--unle