lse could it be at this time of night? Stay where you are, Gilly.
I'll go down and see." And in a moment there was a new tune from the
hall below: "Why, it's Colonel Cheffins!... How sporting of you,
colonel!... Yes, come on up and I'll tell you all about it."

The colonel's answers were at first inaudible up above; but on the
stairs he was explaining that he had awakened about an hour ago with a
conviction that yet another house had been attacked, that in his
inability to get to sleep again he had ultimately risen, and seeing a
light still burning across the road, had ventured to come over to
inquire whether we were still all right. And with that there entered the
Jaeger dressing-suit and bedroom slippers, containing a very different
colonel from the dapper edition I had seen out on the other side of
midnight, and for that matter but a worn and feeble copy of the one we
had both admired the night before.

"That's Witching Hill all over!" cried Uvo as he ushered him in. "You
dreamed of what actually happened at the very time it was actually
happening. And yet our friend Gillon can't see that the whole place is
haunted and enchanted from end to end!"

"I'm not sure that I should go as far as that," said the colonel,
sinking into a chair, while Delavoye mixed a stiff drink for him in his
old glass. "In fact, now you come to put it that way, I'm not so sure
that it was a dream at all. I sleep with my window open, at the front of
the house, and I rather thought I heard shots of sorts."

"Of such a sort," laughed Uvo, "that you must be a light sleeper if they
woke you up. Do you mind telling me, colonel, where you used to keep
those cartridges you were kind enough to give me?"

"In my washstand drawer. I hope there was nothing the matter with them?"

"They wouldn't go off. That was all."

"God bless my soul!" cried Colonel Cheffins, putting down his glass.

"The caps were all right, but I am afraid you can't have kept your
powder quite dry, colonel. I expect you've been swilling out that drawer
in the heat of your ablutions. Devil a bullet would leave the barrel,
and I tried all three."

"But what an infernal disgrace!" cried the colonel, shuffling to his
slippered feet. "Why, the damned things ought to go off if you raised
them from the bottom of the sea! I'll let the makers have it in next
week's _Field_, libel or no libel, you see if I don't! But that won't
console either you or me, Mr. Delavoye, and I can't apol