too,
nor did it ever leave Philip till his death, which took place in Egypt
on his twenty-first birthday. Now, what do you think of that?"

"I think," I replied, "that the phantasm was very probably that of a
real dog, and that it became genuinely attached to your son. I do not
think it was headless, but that, for some reason unknown for the
present, its head never materialised. What was the history of the
house?"

"It had no history as far as I could gather," Mrs Forbes du Barry said.
"A lady once lived there who was devoted to dogs, but no one thinks she
ever had a greyhound."

"Then," I replied thoughtfully, "it is just possible that the headless
dog was the phantasm of the lady herself, or, at least, of one of her
personalities!"

Mrs du Barry appeared somewhat shocked, and I adroitly changed the
conversation. However, I should not be at all surprised if this were the
case.

The improbability of any ancient remains being interred under or near
the house, precludes the idea of barrowvians, whilst the thickly
populated nature of the neighbourhood and the entire absence of
loneliness, renders the possibility of vagrarians equally unlikely. That
being so, one only has to consider the possibility of its being a vice
elemental attracted to the house by the vicious lives and thoughts of
some former occupant, and I am, after all, inclined to favour the theory
that the phantasm was the phantasm of the old dog-loving lady herself,
attaching itself in true canine fashion to the child Philip.

The most popular animal form amongst spirits--the form assumed by them
more often than any other--is undoubtedly the dog. I hear of the occult
dog more often than of any other occult beast, and in many places there
is yet a firm belief that the souls of the wicked are chained to this
earth in the shape of monstrous dogs. According to Mr Dyer, in his
_Ghost World_, a man who hanged himself at Broomfield, near Salisbury,
manifested himself in the guise of a huge black dog; whilst the Lady
Howard of James I.'s reign, for her many misdeeds, not the least of
which was getting rid of her husbands, was, on her death, transformed
into a hound and compelled to run every night, between midnight and
cock-crow, from the gateway of Fitzford, her former residence, to
Oakhampton Park, and bring back to the place, from whence she started, a
blade of grass in her mouth; and this penance she is doomed to continue
till every blade of grass is remove