aori, the fellow who wrote Old New
Zealand?"

"No, what about him?"

"He did not put it in his book, but he told the same yarn, without the
dogs, as having happened to himself. He saw the whole arm, and _the
hand was leprous_."

"Ugh!" said the Beach-comber.

"Next morning he was obliged to view the body of an old Maori, who had
been murdered in his garden the night before. That old man's hand was
the hand he saw. I know a room in an old house in England where
plucking off the bed-clothes goes on, every now and then, and has gone
on as long as the present occupants have been there. But I only heard
lately, and _they_ only heard from me, that the same thing used to
occur, in the same room and no other, in the last generation, when
another family lived there."

"Anybody see anything?"

"No, only footsteps are heard creeping up, before the twitches come
off."

"And what do the people do?"

"Nothing! We set a camera once to photograph the spook. He did not
sit."

"It's rum!" said the Beach-comber. "But mind you, as to spooks, I
don't believe a word of it." {299}

THE GHOST THAT BIT

The idiot Scotch laird in the story would not let the dentist put his
fingers into his mouth, "for I'm feared ye'll bite me". The following
anecdote proves that a ghost may entertain a better founded alarm on
this score. A correspondent of Notes and Queries (3rd Sept., 1864) is
responsible for the narrative, given "almost verbatim from the lips of
the lady herself," a person of tried veracity.

"Emma S---, one of seven children, was sleeping alone, with her face
towards the west, at a large house near C---, in the Staffordshire
moorlands. As she had given orders to her maid to call her at an
early hour, she was not surprised at being awakened between three and
four on a fine August morning in 1840 by a sharp tapping at her door,
when in spite of a "thank you, I hear," to the first and second raps,
with the third came a rush of wind, which caused the curtains to be
drawn up in the centre of the bed. She became annoyed, and sitting up
called out, "Marie, what are you about?"

Instead, however, of her servant, she was astonished to see the face
of an aunt by marriage peering above and between the curtains, and at
the same moment--whether unconsciously she threw forward her arms, or
whether they were drawn forward, as it were, in a vortex of air, she
cannot be sure--one of her thumbs was sensibly pressed between the
te