nothing at all. But always in the
dream there's a smell of lemon verbena--it comes from the garden--and a
curious hissing noise--and a sense of a black man's being somehow mixed up
in it all. . . ."

"A black man?"

"Black or brown . . . in the dream I don't think I've ever actually seen
him. The hissing sound--it's like the hiss of a snake, only ten times
louder--may have come into the dream of late years. As to that I won't
swear. But I'm dead certain there was always a black man mixed up in it,
or what I may call a sense of one: and that, as you will say, is the most
curious part of the whole business."

Sir John flipped away the ash of his cigar and leant forward impressively.

"If I wasn't, as I say, dead sure of his having been in it from the
first," he went on, "I could tell you the exact date when he took a hand
in the game: because," he resumed after another pause, "I once actually
saw what I'm telling you."

"But you told me," objected Mr. Molesworth, "that you had never actually
seen it."

"I was wrong then. I saw it once, in a Burmese boy's hand at Maulmain.
The old Eastern trick, you know: palmful of ink and the rest of it.
There was nothing particular about the boy except an ugly scar on his
cheek (caused, I believe, by his mother having put him down to sleep in
the fireplace while the clay floor of it was nearly red-hot under the
ashes). His master called himself his grandfather--a holy-looking man
with a white beard down to his loins: and the pair of them used to come up
every year from Mergui or some such part, at the Full Moon of Taboung,
which happens at the end of March and is the big feast in Maulmain.
The pair of them stood close by the great entrance of the Shway Dagone,
where the three roads meet, and just below the long flights of steps
leading up to the pagoda. The second day of the feast I was making for
the entrance with a couple of naval officers I had picked up at the Club,
and my man, Moung Gway, following as close as he could keep in the crowd.
Just as we were going up the steps, the old impostor challenged me, and,
partly to show my friends what the game was like--for they were new to the
country--I stopped and found a coin for him. He poured the usual dollop
of ink into the boy's hand, and, by George, sir, next minute I was staring
at the very thing I'd seen a score of times in my dreams but never out of
them. I tell you, there's more in that Eastern hanky-panky than mee