Chapter 2

My brother-in-law did not attach much importance to the story,
regarding it as an old woman's tale, and, unlike his predecessors,
made no attempt whatever to discover the hidden gold.

"Unless business was very different then from what it is now," said
my brother-in-law, "I don't see how a miller could very well have
saved anything, however much of a miser he might have been: at all
events, not enough to make it worth the trouble of looking for it."

Still, he could not altogether get rid of the idea of that
treasure.

One night he went to bed. There was nothing very extraordinary
about that, I admit. He often did go to bed of a night. What WAS
remarkable, however, was that exactly as the clock of the village
church chimed the last stroke of twelve, my brother-in-law woke up
with a start, and felt himself quite unable to go to sleep again.

Joe (his Christian name was Joe) sat up in bed, and looked around.

At the foot of the bed something stood very still, wrapped in
shadow.

It moved into the moonlight, and then my brother-in-law saw that it
was the figure of a wizened little old man, in knee-breeches and a
pig-tail.

In an instant the story of the hidden treasure and the old miser
flashed across his mind.

"He's come to show me where it's hid," thought my brother-in-law;
and he resolved that he would not spend all this money on himself,
but would devote a small percentage of it towards doing good to
others.

The apparition moved towards the door: my brother-in-law put on
his trousers and followed it. The ghost went downstairs into the
kitchen, glided over and stood in front of the hearth, sighed and
disappeared.

Next morning, Joe had a couple of bricklayers in, and made them
haul out the stove and pull down the chimney, while he stood behind
with a potato-sack in which to put the gold.

They knocked down half the wall, and never found so much as a four-
penny bit. My brother-in-law did not know what to think.

The next night the old man appeared again, and again led the way
into the kitchen. This time, however, instead of going to the
fireplace, it stood more in the middle of the room, and sighed
there.

"Oh, I see what he means now," said my brother-in-law to himself;
"it's under the floor. Why did the old idiot go and stand up
against the stove, so as to make me think it was up the chimney?"

They spent the next day in taking up the kitchen floor; but the
only thing they found was a three-pronged fork, and the handle of
that was broken.

On the third night, the ghost reappeared, quite unabashed, and for
a third time made for the kitchen. Arrived there, it looked up at
the ceiling and vanished.

"Umph! he don't seem to have learned much sense where he's been
to," muttered Joe, as he trotted back to bed; "I should have
thought he might have done that at first."

Still, there seemed no doubt now where the treasure lay, and the
first thing after breakfast they started pulling down the ceiling.
They got every inch of the ceiling down, and they took up the
boards of the room above.

They discovered about as much treasure as you would expect to find
in an empty quart-pot.

On the fourth night, when the ghost appeared, as usual, my brother-
in-law was so wild that he threw his boots at it; and the boots
passed through the body, and broke a looking-glass.

On the fifth night, when Joe awoke, as he always did now at twelve,
the ghost was standing in a dejected attitude, looking very
miserable. There was an appealing look in its large sad eyes that
quite touched my brother-in-law.

"After all," he thought, "perhaps the silly chap's doing his best.
Maybe he has forgotten where he really did put it, and is trying to
remember. I'll give him another chance."

The ghost appeared grateful and delighted at seeing Joe prepare to
follow him, and led the way into the attic, pointed to the ceiling,
and vanished.

"Well, he's hit it this time, I do hope," said my brother-in-law;
and next day they set to work to take the roof off the place.

It took them three days to get the roof thoroughly off, and all
they found was a bird's nest; after securing which they covered up
the house with tarpaulins, to keep it dry.

You might have thought that would have cured the poor fellow of
looking for treasure. But it didn't.

He said there must be something in it all, or the ghost would never
keep on coming as it did; and that, having gone so far, he would go
on to the end, and solve the mystery, cost what it might.

Night after night, he would get out of his bed and follow that
spectral old fraud about the house. Each night, the old man would
indicate a different place; and, on each following day, my brother-
in-law would proceed to break up the mill at the point indicated,
and look for the treasure. At the end of three weeks, there was
not a room in the mill fit to live in. Every wall had been pulled
down, every floor had been taken up, every ceiling had had a hole
knocked in it. And then, as suddenly as they had begun, the
ghost's visits ceased; and my brother-in-law was left in peace, to
rebuild the place at his leisure.

"What induced the old image to play such a silly trick upon a
family man and a ratepayer?" Ah! that's just what I cannot tell
you.

Some said that the ghost of the wicked old man had done it to
punish my brother-in-law for not believing in him at first; while
others held that the apparition was probably that of some deceased
local plumber and glazier, who would naturally take an interest in
seeing a house knocked about and spoilt. But nobody knew anything
for certain.

INTERLUDE

We had some more punch, and then the curate told us a story.

I could not make head or tail of the curate's story, so I cannot
retail it to you. We none of us could make head or tail of that
story. It was a good story enough, so far as material went. There
seemed to be an enormous amount of plot, and enough incident to
have made a dozen novels. I never before heard a story containing
so much incident, nor one dealing with so many varied characters.

I should say that every human being our curate had ever known or
met, or heard of, was brought into that story. There were simply
hundreds of them. Every five seconds he would introduce into the
tale a completely fresh collection of characters accompanied by a
brand new set of incidents.

This was the sort of story it was:-

"Well, then, my uncle went into the garden, and got his gun, but,
of course, it wasn't there, and Scroggins said he didn't believe
it."

"Didn't believe what? Who's Scroggins?"

"Scroggins! Oh, why he was the other man, you know--it was his wife."

"WHAT was his wife--what's SHE got to do with it?"

"Why, that's what I'm telling you. It was she that found the hat.
She'd come up with her cousin to London--her cousin was my sister-
in-law, and the other niece had married a man named Evans, and
Evans, after it was all over, had taken the box round to Mr.
Jacobs', because Jacobs' father had seen the man, when he was
alive, and when he was dead, Joseph--"

"Now look here, never you mind Evans and the box; what's become of
your uncle and the gun?"

"The gun! What gun?"

"Why, the gun that your uncle used to keep in the garden, and that
wasn't there. What did he do with it? Did he kill any of these
people with it--these Jacobses and Evanses and Scrogginses and
Josephses? Because, if so, it was a good and useful work, and we
should enjoy hearing about it."

"No--oh no--how could he?--he had been built up alive in the wall,
you know, and when Edward IV spoke to the abbot about it, my sister
said that in her then state of health she could not and would not,
as it was endangering the child's life. So they christened it
Horatio, after her own son, who had been killed at Waterloo before
he was born, and Lord Napier himself said--"

"Look here, do you know what you are talking about?" we asked him
at this point.

He said "No," but he knew it was every word of it true, because his
aunt had seen it herself. Whereupon we covered him over with the
tablecloth, and he went to sleep.

And then Uncle told us a story.

Uncle said his was a real story.

THE GHOST OF THE BLUE CHAMBER
(My Uncle's Story)

"I don't want to make you fellows nervous," began my uncle in a
peculiarly impressive, not to say blood-curdling, tone of voice,
"and if you would rather that I did not mention it, I won't; but,
as a matter of fact, this very house, in which we are now sitting,
is haunted."

"You don't say that!" exclaimed Mr. Coombes.

"What's the use of your saying I don't say it when I have just said
it?" retorted my uncle somewhat pettishly. "You do talk so
foolishly. I tell you the house is haunted. Regularly on
Christmas Eve the Blue Chamber [they called the room next to the
nursery the 'blue chamber,' at my uncle's, most of the toilet
service being of that shade] is haunted by the ghost of a sinful
man--a man who once killed a Christmas wait with a lump of coal."

"How did he do it?" asked Mr. Coombes, with eager anxiousness.
"Was it difficult?"

"I do not know how he did it," replied my uncle; "he did not
explain the process. The wait had taken up a position just inside
the front gate, and was singing a ballad. It is presumed that,
when he opened his mouth for B flat, the lump of coal was thrown by
the sinful man from one of the windows, and that it went down the
wait's throat and choked him."

"You want to be a good shot, but it is certainly worth trying,"
murmured Mr. Coombes thoughtfully.

"But that was not his only crime, alas!" added my uncle. "Prior to
that he had killed a solo cornet-player."

"No! Is that really a fact?" exclaimed Mr. Coombes.

"Of course it's a fact," answered my uncle testily; "at all events,
as much a fact as you can expect to get in a case of this sort.

"How very captious you are this evening. The circumstantial
evidence was overwhelming. The poor fellow, the cornet-player, had
been in the neighbourhood barely a month. Old Mr. Bishop, who kept
the 'Jolly Sand Boys' at the time, and from whom I had the story,
said he had never known a more hard-working and energetic solo
cornet-player. He, the cornet-player, only knew two tunes, but Mr.
Bishop said that the man could not have played with more vigour, or
for more hours in a day, if he had known forty. The two tunes he
did play were "Annie Laurie" and "Home, Sweet Home"; and as
regarded his performance of the former melody, Mr. Bishop said that
a mere child could have told what it was meant for.

"This musician--this poor, friendless artist used to come regularly
and play in this street just opposite for two hours every evening.
One evening he was seen, evidently in response to an invitation,
going into this very house, BUT WAS NEVER SEEN COMING OUT OF IT!"

"Did the townsfolk try offering any reward for his recovery?" asked
Mr. Coombes.

"Not a ha'penny," replied my uncle.

"Another summer," continued my uncle, "a German band visited here,
intending--so they announced on their arrival--to stay till the
autumn.

"On the second day from their arrival, the whole company, as fine
and healthy a body of men as one could wish to see, were invited to
dinner by this sinful man, and, after spending the whole of the
next twenty-four hours in bed, left the town a broken and dyspeptic
crew; the parish doctor, who had attended them, giving it as his
opinion that it was doubtful if they would, any of them, be fit to
play an air again."

"You--you don't know the recipe, do you?" asked Mr. Coombes.

"Unfortunately I do not," replied my uncle; "but the chief
ingredient was said to have been railway refreshment-room pork-pie.

"I forget the man's other crimes," my uncle went on; "I used to
know them all at one time, but my memory is not what it was. I do
not, however, believe I am doing his memory an injustice in
believing that he was not entirely unconnected with the death, and
subsequent burial, of a gentleman who used to play the harp with
his toes; and that neither was he altogether unresponsible for the
lonely grave of an unknown stranger who had once visited the
neighbourhood, an Italian peasant lad, a performer upon the barrel-
organ.

"Every Christmas Eve," said my uncle, cleaving with low impressive
tones the strange awed silence that, like a shadow, seemed to have
slowly stolen into and settled down upon the room, "the ghost of
this sinful man haunts the Blue Chamber, in this very house.
There, from midnight until cock-crow, amid wild muffled shrieks and
groans and mocking laughter and the ghostly sound of horrid blows,
it does fierce phantom fight with the spirits of the solo cornet-
player and the murdered wait, assisted at intervals, by the shades
of the German band; while the ghost of the strangled harpist plays
mad ghostly melodies with ghostly toes on the ghost of a broken
harp.

Uncle said the Blue Chamber was comparatively useless as a
sleeping-apartment on Christmas Eve.

"Hark!" said uncle, raising a warning hand towards the ceiling,
while we held our breath, and listened; "Hark! I believe they are
at it now--in the BLUE CHAMBER!"

THE BLUE CHAMBER

I rose up, and said that I would sleep in the Blue Chamber.

Before I tell you my own story, however--the story of what happened
in the Blue Chamber--I would wish to preface it with -

A PERSONAL EXPLANATION

I feel a good deal of hesitation about telling you this story of my
own. You see it is not a story like the other stories that I have
been telling you, or rather that Teddy Biffles, Mr. Coombes, and my
uncle have been telling you: it is a true story. It is not a
story told by a person sitting round a fire on Christmas Eve,
drinking whisky punch: it is a record of events that actually
happened.

Indeed, it is not a 'story' at all, in the commonly accepted
meaning of the word: it is a report. It is, I feel, almost out of
place in a book of this kind. It is more suitable to a biography,
or an English history.

There is another thing that makes it difficult for me to tell you
this story, and that is, that it is all about myself. In telling
you this story, I shall have to keep on talking about myself; and
talking about ourselves is what we modern-day authors have a strong
objection to doing. If we literary men of the new school have one
praiseworthy yearning more ever present to our minds than another
it is the yearning never to appear in the slightest degree
egotistical.

I myself, so I am told, carry this coyness--this shrinking
reticence concerning anything connected with my own personality,
almost too far; and people grumble at me because of it. People
come to me and say -

"Well, now, why don't you talk about yourself a bit? That's what
we want to read about. Tell us something about yourself."

But I have always replied, "No." It is not that I do not think the
subject an interesting one. I cannot myself conceive of any topic
more likely to prove fascinating to the world as a whole, or at all
events to the cultured portion of it. But I will not do it, on
principle. It is inartistic, and it sets a bad example to the
younger men. Other writers (a few of them) do it, I know; but I
will not--not as a rule.

Under ordinary circumstances, therefore, I should not tell you this
story at all. I should say to myself, "No! It is a good story, it
is a moral story, it is a strange, weird, enthralling sort of a
story; and the public, I know, would like to hear it; and I should
like to tell it to them; but it is all about myself--about what I
said, and what I saw, and what I did, and I cannot do it. My
retiring, anti-egotistical nature will not permit me to talk in
this way about myself."

But the circumstances surrounding this story are not ordinary, and
there are reasons prompting me, in spite of my modesty, to rather
welcome the opportunity of relating it.

As I stated at the beginning, there has been unpleasantness in our
family over this party of ours, and, as regards myself in
particular, and my share in the events I am now about to set forth,
gross injustice has been done me.

As a means of replacing my character in its proper light--of
dispelling the clouds of calumny and misconception with which it
has been darkened, I feel that my best course is to give a simple,
dignified narration of the plain facts, and allow the unprejudiced
to judge for themselves. My chief object, I candidly confess, is
to clear myself from unjust aspersion. Spurred by this motive--and
I think it is an honourable and a right motive--I find I am enabled
to overcome my usual repugnance to talking about myself, and can
thus tell -

MY OWN STORY

As soon as my uncle had finished his story, I, as I have already
told you, rose up and said that _I_ would sleep in the Blue Chamber
that very night.

"Never!" cried my uncle, springing up. "You shall not put yourself
in this deadly peril. Besides, the bed is not made."

"Never mind the bed," I replied. "I have lived in furnished
apartments for gentlemen, and have been accustomed to sleep on beds
that have never been made from one year's end to the other. Do not
thwart me in my resolve. I am young, and have had a clear
conscience now for over a month. The spirits will not harm me. I
may even do them some little good, and induce them to be quiet and
go away. Besides, I should like to see the show."

Saying which, I sat down again. (How Mr. Coombes came to be in my
chair, instead of at the other side of the room, where he had been
all the evening; and why he never offered to apologise when I sat
right down on top of him; and why young Biffles should have tried
to palm himself off upon me as my Uncle John, and induced me, under
that erroneous impression, to shake him by the hand for nearly
three minutes, and tell him that I had always regarded him as
father,--are matters that, to this day, I have never been able to
fully understand.)

They tried to dissuade me from what they termed my foolhardy
enterprise, but I remained firm, and claimed my privilege. I was
'the guest.' 'The guest' always sleeps in the haunted chamber on
Christmas Eve; it is his perquisite.

They said that if I put it on that footing, they had, of course, no
answer; and they lighted a candle for me, and accompanied me
upstairs in a body.

Whether elevated by the feeling that I was doing a noble action, or
animated by a mere general consciousness of rectitude, is not for
me to say, but I went upstairs that night with remarkable buoyancy.
It was as much as I could do to stop at the landing when I came to
it; I felt I wanted to go on up to the roof. But, with the help of
the banisters, I restrained my ambition, wished them all good-
night, and went in and shut the door.

Things began to go wrong with me from the very first. The candle
tumbled out of the candlestick before my hand was off the lock. It
kept on tumbling out of the candlestick, and every time I picked
put it up and put it in, it tumbled out again: I never saw such a
slippery candle. I gave up attempting to use the candlestick at
last, and carried the candle about in my hand; and, even then, it
would not keep upright. So I got wild and threw it out of window,
and undressed and went to bed in the dark.

I did not go to sleep,--I did not feel sleepy at all,--I lay on my
back, looking up at the ceiling, and thinking of things. I wish I
could remember some of the ideas that came to me as I lay there,
because they were so amusing. I laughed at them myself till the
bed shook.

I had been lying like this for half an hour or so, and had
forgotten all about the ghost, when, on casually casting my eyes
round the room, I noticed for the first time a singularly
contented-looking phantom, sitting in the easy-chair by the fire,
smoking the ghost of a long clay pipe.

I fancied for the moment, as most people would under similar
circumstances, that I must be dreaming. I sat up, and rubbed my
eyes.

No! It was a ghost, clear enough. I could see the back of the
chair through his body. He looked over towards me, took the
shadowy pipe from his lips, and nodded.

The most surprising part of the whole thing to me was that I did
not feel in the least alarmed. If anything, I was rather pleased
to see him. It was company.

I said, "Good evening. It's been a cold day!"

He said he had not noticed it himself, but dared say I was right.

We remained silent for a few seconds, and then, wishing to put it
pleasantly, I said, "I believe I have the honour of addressing the
ghost of the gentleman who had the accident with the wait?"

He smiled, and said it was very good of me to remember it. One
wait was not much to boast of, but still, every little helped.

I was somewhat staggered at his answer. I had expected a groan of
remorse. The ghost appeared, on the contrary, to be rather
conceited over the business. I thought that, as he had taken my
reference to the wait so quietly, perhaps he would not be offended
if I questioned him about the organ-grinder. I felt curious about
that poor boy.

"Is it true," I asked, "that you had a hand in the death of that
Italian peasant lad who came to the town once with a barrel-organ
that played nothing but Scotch airs?"

He quite fired up. "Had a hand in it!" he exclaimed indignantly.
"Who has dared to pretend that he assisted me? I murdered the
youth myself. Nobody helped me. Alone I did it. Show me the man
who says I didn't."

I calmed him. I assured him that I had never, in my own mind,
doubted that he was the real and only assassin, and I went on and
asked him what he had done with the body of the cornet-player he
had killed.

He said, "To which one may you be alluding?"

"Oh, were there any more then?" I inquired.

He smiled, and gave a little cough. He said he did not like to
appear to be boasting, but that, counting trombones, there were
seven.

"Dear me!" I replied, "you must have had quite a busy time of it,
one way and another."

He said that perhaps he ought not to be the one to say so, but that
really, speaking of ordinary middle-society, he thought there were
few ghosts who could look back upon a life of more sustained
usefulness.

He puffed away in silence for a few seconds, while I sat watching
him. I had never seen a ghost smoking a pipe before, that I could
remember, and it interested me.

I asked him what tobacco he used, and he replied, "The ghost of cut
cavendish, as a rule."

He explained that the ghost of all the tobacco that a man smoked in
life belonged to him when he became dead. He said he himself had
smoked a good deal of cut cavendish when he was alive, so that he
was well supplied with the ghost of it now.

I observed that it was a useful thing to know that, and I made up
my mind to smoke as much tobacco as ever I could before I died.

I thought I might as well start at once, so I said I would join him
in a pipe, and he said, "Do, old man"; and I reached over and got
out the necessary paraphernalia from my coat pocket and lit up.

We grew quite chummy after that, and he told me all his crimes. He
said he had lived next door once to a young lady who was learning
to play the guitar, while a gentleman who practised on the bass-
viol lived opposite. And he, with fiendish cunning, had introduced
these two unsuspecting young people to one another, and had
persuaded them to elope with each other against their parents'
wishes, and take their musical instruments with them; and they had
done so, and, before the honeymoon was over, SHE had broken his
head with the bass-viol, and HE had tried to cram the guitar down
her throat, and had injured her for life.

My friend said he used to lure muffin-men into the passage and then
stuff them with their own wares till they burst and died. He said
he had quieted eighteen that way.

Young men and women who recited long and dreary poems at evening
parties, and callow youths who walked about the streets late at
night, playing concertinas, he used to get together and poison in
batches of ten, so as to save expense; and park orators and
temperance lecturers he used to shut up six in a small room with a
glass of water and a collection-box apiece, and let them talk each
other to death.

It did one good to listen to him.

I asked him when he expected the other ghosts--the ghosts of the
wait and the cornet-player, and the German band that Uncle John had
mentioned. He smiled, and said they would never come again, any of
them.

I said, "Why; isn't it true, then, that they meet you here every
Christmas Eve for a row?"

He replied that it WAS true. Every Christmas Eve, for twenty-five
years, had he and they fought in that room; but they would never
trouble him nor anybody else again. One by one, had he laid them
out, spoilt, and utterly useless for all haunting purposes. He had
finished off the last German-band ghost that very evening, just
before I came upstairs, and had thrown what was left of it out
through the slit between the window-sashes. He said it would never
be worth calling a ghost again.

"I suppose you will still come yourself, as usual?" I said. "They
would be sorry to miss you, I know."

"Oh, I don't know," he replied; "there's nothing much to come for
now. Unless," he added kindly, "YOU are going to be here. I'll
come if you will sleep here next Christmas Eve."

"I have taken a liking to you," he continued; "you don't fly off,
screeching, when you see a party, and your hair doesn't stand on
end. You've no idea," he said, "how sick I am of seeing people's
hair standing on end."

He said it irritated him.

Just then a slight noise reached us from the yard below, and he
started and turned deathly black.

"You are ill," I cried, springing towards him; "tell me the best
thing to do for you. Shall I drink some brandy, and give you the
ghost of it?"

He remained silent, listening intently for a moment, and then he
gave a sigh of relief, and the shade came back to his cheek.

"It's all right," he murmured; "I was afraid it was the cock."

"Oh, it's too early for that," I said. "Why, it's only the middle
of the night."

"Oh, that doesn't make any difference to those cursed chickens," he
replied bitterly. "They would just as soon crow in the middle of
the night as at any other time--sooner, if they thought it would
spoil a chap's evening out. I believe they do it on purpose."

He said a friend of his, the ghost of a man who had killed a water-
rate collector, used to haunt a house in Long Acre, where they kept
fowls in the cellar, and every time a policeman went by and flashed
his bull's-eye down the grating, the old cock there would fancy it
was the sun, and start crowing like mad; when, of course, the poor
ghost had to dissolve, and it would, in consequence, get back home
sometimes as early as one o'clock in the morning, swearing
fearfully because it had only been out for an hour.

I agreed that it seemed very unfair.

"Oh, it's an absurd arrangement altogether," he continued, quite
angrily. "I can't imagine what our old man could have been
thinking of when he made it. As I have said to him, over and over
again, 'Have a fixed time, and let everybody stick to it--say four
o'clock in summer, and six in winter. Then one would know what one
was about.'"

"How do you manage when there isn't any cock handy?" I inquired.

He was on the point of replying, when again he started and
listened. This time I distinctly heard Mr. Bowles's cock, next
door, crow twice.

"There you are," he said, rising and reaching for his hat; "that's
the sort of thing we have to put up with. What IS the time?"

I looked at my watch, and found it was half-past three.

"I thought as much," he muttered. "I'll wring that blessed bird's
neck if I get hold of it." And he prepared to go.

"If you can wait half a minute," I said, getting out of bed, "I'll
go a bit of the way with you."

"It's very good of you," he rejoined, pausing, "but it seems unkind
to drag you out."

"Not at all," I replied; "I shall like a walk." And I partially
dressed myself, and took my umbrella; and he put his arm through
mine, and we went out together.

Just by the gate we met Jones, one of the local constables.

"Good-night, Jones," I said (I always feel affable at Christmas-
time).

"Good-night, sir," answered the man a little gruffly, I thought.
"May I ask what you're a-doing of?"

"Oh, it's all right," I responded, with a wave of my umbrella; "I'm
just seeing my friend part of the way home."

He said, "What friend?"

"Oh, ah, of course," I laughed; "I forgot. He's invisible to you.
He is the ghost of the gentleman that killed the wait. I'm just
going to the corner with him."

"Ah, I don't think I would, if I was you, sir," said Jones
severely. "If you take my advice, you'll say good-bye to your
friend here, and go back indoors. Perhaps you are not aware that
you are walking about with nothing on but a night-shirt and a pair
of boots and an opera-hat. Where's your trousers?"

I did not like the man's manner at all. I said, "Jones! I don't
wish to have to report you, but it seems to me you've been
drinking. My trousers are where a man's trousers ought to be--on
his legs. I distinctly remember putting them on."

"Well, you haven't got them on now," he retorted.

"I beg your pardon," I replied. "I tell you I have; I think I
ought to know."

"I think so, too," he answered, "but you evidently don't. Now you
come along indoors with me, and don't let's have any more of it."

Uncle John came to the door at this point, having been awaked, I
suppose, by the altercation; and, at the same moment, Aunt Maria
appeared at the window in her nightcap.

I explained the constable's mistake to them, treating the matter as
lightly as I could, so as not to get the man into trouble, and I
turned for confirmation to the ghost.

He was gone! He had left me without a word--without even saying
good-bye!

It struck me as so unkind, his having gone off in that way, that I
burst into tears; and Uncle John came out, and led me back into the
house.

On reaching my room, I discovered that Jones was right. I had not
put on my trousers, after all. They were still hanging over the
bed-rail. I suppose, in my anxiety not to keep the ghost waiting,
I must have forgotten them.

Such are the plain facts of the case, out of which it must,
doubtless, to the healthy, charitable mind appear impossible that
calumny could spring.

But it has.

Persons--I say 'persons'--have professed themselves unable to
understand the simple circumstances herein narrated, except in the
light of explanations at once misleading and insulting. Slurs have
been cast and aspersions made on me by those of my own flesh and
blood.

But I bear no ill-feeling. I merely, as I have said, set forth
this statement for the purpose of clearing my character from
injurious suspicion.