en who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk,
or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer
their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned
backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little
children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the
fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist
and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however,
are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has
yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but
many English ghosts have scared 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.