re
for a good half-hour alone, looking out at the moonlight. As his mother
is an economical woman there was no candle lit in the room, so he got
his pleasure out of the shadows which the great trees made on the
highroad, when suddenly--you ought to hear the little fellow tell it--he
felt the hair rise on his forehead and all his body grow stiff with a
terror that made his tongue feel like lead in his mouth. A something he
would have called a horse and a carriage in the daytime, but which, in
this light and under the influence of the mortal terror he was in, took
on a distorted shape which made it unlike any team he was accustomed to,
was going by, not as if being driven over the earth and stones of the
road,--though there was a driver in front, a driver with an odd
three-cornered hat on his head and a cloak about his shoulders, such as
the little fellow remembered to have seen hanging in his grandmother's
closet,--but as if it floated along without sound or stir; in fact, a
spectre team which seemed to find its proper destination when it turned
into Lost Man's Lane and was lost among the shadows of that ill-reputed
road."

"Pshaw!" was my spirited comment as she paused to take her breath and
see how I was affected by this grewsome tale. "A dream of the poor
little lad! He had heard stories of this apparition and his imagination
supplied the rest."

"No; excuse me, madam, he had been carefully kept from hearing all such
tales. You could see this by the way he told his story. He hardly
believed what he had himself seen. It was not till some foolish neighbor
blurted out, 'Why, that was the phantom coach,' that he had any idea he
was not relating a dream."

My second _Pshaw!_ was no less marked than the first.

"He did know about it, notwithstanding," I insisted. "Only he had
forgotten the fact. Sleep often supplies us with these lost memories."

"Very true, and your supposition is very plausible, Miss Butterworth,
and might be regarded as correct, if he had been the only person to see
this apparition. But Mrs. Jenkins saw it too, and she is a woman to be
believed."

This was becoming serious.

"Saw it before he did or afterwards?" I asked. "Does she live on the
highway or somewhere in Lost Man's Lane?"

"She lives on the highway about a half-mile from the station. She was
sitting up with her sick husband and saw it just as it was going down
the hill. She said it made no more noise than a cloud slipping by. She
e