came into his eyes; he ground his
toothless gums together; and, raising his withered hands high above his
head, swore according to the picturesque phraseology of the antique
school, that, when Chanticleer had sounded twice his merry horn, deeds
of blood would be wrought, and murder walk abroad with silent feet.

Hardly had he finished this awful oath when, from the red-tiled roof of
a distant homestead, a cock crew. He laughed a long, low, bitter laugh,
and waited. Hour after hour he waited, but the cock, for some strange
reason, did not crow again. Finally, at half-past seven, the arrival of
the housemaids made him give up his fearful vigil, and he stalked back
to his room, thinking of his vain oath and baffled purpose. There he
consulted several books of ancient chivalry, of which he was
exceedingly fond, and found that, on every occasion on which this oath
had been used, Chanticleer had always crowed a second time. "Perdition
seize the naughty fowl," he muttered, "I have seen the day when, with my
stout spear, I would have run him through the gorge, and made him crow
for me an 'twere in death!" He then retired to a comfortable lead
coffin, and stayed there till evening.

IV

[Illustration: "HE MET WITH A SEVERE FALL"]

The next day the ghost was very weak and tired. The terrible excitement
of the last four weeks was beginning to have its effect. His nerves were
completely shattered, and he started at the slightest noise. For five
days he kept his room, and at last made up his mind to give up the point
of the blood-stain on the library floor. If the Otis family did not want
it, they clearly did not deserve it. They were evidently people on a
low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating
the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. The question of phantasmic
apparitions, and the development of astral bodies, was of course quite a
different matter, and really not under his control. It was his solemn
duty to appear in the corridor once a week, and to gibber from the large
oriel window on the first and third Wednesdays in every month, and he
did not see how he could honourably escape from his obligations. It is
quite true that his life had been very evil, but, upon the other hand,
he was most conscientious in all things connected with the supernatural.
For the next three Saturdays, accordingly, he traversed the corridor as
usual between midnight and three o'clock, taking every possible
pre