olling of itself at midnight for the dead. I tolled my
bell--how, or how long, I don't know--and ran home to bed as fast as I
could touch the ground.

'I was up early next morning after a restless night, and told the story
to my neighbours. Some were serious and some made light of it; I don't
think anybody believed it real. But, that morning, Mr Reuben Haredale
was found murdered in his bedchamber; and in his hand was a piece of the
cord attached to an alarm-bell outside the roof, which hung in his room
and had been cut asunder, no doubt by the murderer, when he seized it.

'That was the bell I heard.

'A bureau was found opened, and a cash-box, which Mr Haredale had
brought down that day, and was supposed to contain a large sum of money,
was gone. The steward and gardener were both missing and both suspected
for a long time, but they were never found, though hunted far and wide.
And far enough they might have looked for poor Mr Rudge the steward,
whose body--scarcely to be recognised by his clothes and the watch and
ring he wore--was found, months afterwards, at the bottom of a piece of
water in the grounds, with a deep gash in the breast where he had been
stabbed with a knife. He was only partly dressed; and people all agreed
that he had been sitting up reading in his own room, where there were
many traces of blood, and was suddenly fallen upon and killed before his
master.

Everybody now knew that the gardener must be the murderer, and though
he has never been heard of from that day to this, he will be, mark my
words. The crime was committed this day two-and-twenty years--on the
nineteenth of March, one thousand seven hundred and fifty-three. On the
nineteenth of March in some year--no matter when--I know it, I am sure
of it, for we have always, in some strange way or other, been brought
back to the subject on that day ever since--on the nineteenth of March
in some year, sooner or later, that man will be discovered.'

Chapter 2

'A strange story!' said the man who had been the cause of the
narration.--'Stranger still if it comes about as you predict. Is that
all?'

A question so unexpected, nettled Solomon Daisy not a little. By dint of
relating the story very often, and ornamenting it (according to village
report) with a few flourishes suggested by the various hearers from time
to time, he had come by degrees to tell it with great effect; and 'Is
that all?' after the climax, was not what he was accusto