nterested. What his kinsman had expected him to be I know
not; but I made Mr. Searle out as annoyed, in spite of his exaggerated
urbanity, at finding him so harmless. Our host was not the man to
show his hand, but I think his best card had been a certain implicit
confidence that so provincial a parasite would hardly have good manners.

He led the conversation to the country we had left; rather as if a leash
had been attached to the collar of some lumpish and half-domesticated
animal the tendency of whose movements had to be recognised. He spoke of
it indeed as of some fabled planet, alien to the British orbit, lately
proclaimed to have the admixture of atmospheric gases required
to support animal life, but not, save under cover of a liberal
afterthought, to be admitted into one's regular conception of things. I,
for my part, felt nothing but regret that the spheric smoothness of
his universe should be disfigured by the extrusion even of such
inconsiderable particles as ourselves.

"I knew in a general way of our having somehow ramified over there," Mr.
Searle mentioned; "but had scarcely followed it more than you pretend to
pick up the fruit your long-armed pear tree may drop, on the other side
of your wall, in your neighbour's garden. There was a man I knew at
Cambridge, a very odd fellow, a decent fellow too; he and I were rather
cronies; I think he afterwards went to the Middle States. They'll be,
I suppose, about the Mississippi? At all events, there was that
great-uncle of mine whom Sir Joshua painted. He went to America, but he
never got there. He was lost at sea. You look enough like him to make
one fancy he DID get there and that you've kept him alive by one of
those beastly processes--I think you have 'em over there: what do you
call it, 'putting up' things? If you're he you've not done a wise thing
to show yourself here. He left a bad name behind him. There's a ghost
who comes sobbing about the house every now and then, the ghost of one
to whom he did a wrong."

"Oh mercy ON us!" cried Miss Searle in simple horror.

"Of course YOU know nothing of such things," he rather dryly allowed.
"You're too sound a sleeper to hear the sobbing of ghosts."

"I'm sure I should like immensely to hear the sobbing of a ghost," said
my friend, the light of his previous eagerness playing up into his eyes.
"Why does it sob? I feel as if that were what we've come above all to
learn."

Mr. Searle eyed his audience a moment ga