s who sneer at priests. It is
droll."

FIVE SKETCHES

BY R. THURSTON HOPKINS

I

OMBOS

We were talking at the club about spirit manifestations, and retailing
the usual second or third-hand accounts of family spooks and deceased
aunts showing themselves to their sorrowing relatives.

"It is strange the tricks which our brains will sometimes play us," said
Barton. "I remember once seeing a ghost myself, and I can tell you that
the sensation is a very curious one. It was a good many years ago, when
I was out in Bombay in the National Indian Bank, and I had been sitting
up until the early hours trying to trace some fraudulent entries in the
bank's books by one of our clerks who had absconded with a considerable
sum of money.

"Everybody in the bank building had long since gone home or to bed,
where I ought to have been myself, so I was vastly astonished when I
looked up from the ledger to see somebody sitting at the desk where I
myself had been writing a few moments before. I felt quite upset for a
moment, until I recognised the intruder. He was nebulous, but I could
see plainly enough who it was."

"A member of your family in England?" asked Duckford, who was a firm
believer in the good old-fashioned second sight of the Scotch
Highlanders. Barton answered in his peculiarly quiet way.

"No, it was myself. The appearance of seeing an image of one's self is
not altogether unusual, I believe. But, of course, such a thing is
really all nonsense ... a matter of nerves."

"Now, I do not think it is fair of you to put all such things down to
nerves," said Captain Crabbe, who had returned wounded from France after
being in the field since the outbreak of the Great War. "If one cannot
always explain, one need not therefore ridicule." Crabbe made this
remark with a gravity that was somewhat unusual with him.

"Bless my soul, boy, you haven't been seeing the Angels of Mons or the
Agincourt Bowmen over there in Flanders, have you?" asked Duckford,
regarding Crabbe with a keen eye, and scenting something savouring of
the mysterious, the super-natural. "Do you believe in these stories? I
mean--superstitions?"

Captain Crabbe shook his head. "Not greatly," he said smiling. "But I am
not one of those who thoughtlessly laugh at that which is out of the
common, merely because it cannot be explained on ordinary grounds. Not
since I have spent nearly twelve months over in France, at any rate. Are
you interested