atural manner--I could have sworn I saw Launcelot,
her pet!

There was also a man, a brilliant writer, who from a boy had been
obsessed with a craze for all sorts of glossy things, more especially
buttons. The mania grew; he spent all his time running after girls who
were manicured, or who wore shining buttons, and, when he married, he
besought his wife to sew buttons on every article of her apparel. In the
end, he is said to have swallowed a button, merely to enjoy the
sensation of its smooth surface on the coats of his stomach.

This somewhat exaggerated instance of obsession serves to show that, no
matter how extraordinary the thought-germ, it may enter one's mind and
finally become a passion.

That the majority of people are obsessed, though in a varying degree, is
a generally accepted fact; but that furniture can be possessed by occult
brains, though not a generally accepted fact, is, I believe, equally
true.

In a former work, entitled _Some Haunted Houses of England and Wales_,
published by Mr Eveleigh Nash, I described how a bog-oak grandfather's
clock was possessed by a peculiar type of elemental, which I
subsequently classified as a vagrarian, or kind of grotesque spirit that
inhabits wild and lonely places, and, not infrequently, spots where
there are the remains of prehistoric (and even latter-day) man and
beast. In another volume called _The Haunted Houses of London_, I
narrated the haunting of a house in Portman Square by a grandfather's
clock, the spirit in possession causing it to foretell death by
striking certain times; and I have since heard of hauntings by phenomena
of a more or less similar nature.

The following is an example. A very dear friend of mine was taken ill
shortly before Christmas. No one at the time suspected there was
anything serious the matter with her, although her health of late had
been far from good. I happened to be staying in the house just then, and
found, that for some reason or other, I could not sleep. I do not often
suffer from insomnia, so that the occurrence struck me as somewhat
extraordinary. My bedroom opened on to a large, dark landing. In one
corner of it stood a very old grandfather's clock, the ticking of which
I could distinctly hear when the house was quiet. For the first two or
three nights of my visit the clock was as usual, but, the night before
my friend was taken ill, its ticking became strangely irregular. At one
moment it sounded faint, at the next