being slow of movement, started for Sheila's room. But before she so
much as reached the foot of the stairs a neighbor woman came running in,
wiping her eyes with her shawl-end and saying, "Poor Sheila died this
minute over t' the hospital!" I can't tell it as Terry told it, and I
don't know whether he himself believed in it or not, but the huge bulk
of Olie Larson sat there bathed in a fine sweat, with his eyes fixed on
the stove front. He was by no means happy, and yet he seemed unable to
tear himself away, just as Gimlets and I used to sit chained to the spot
while Grandfather Heppelwhite continued to intone the dolorous history
of the "Babes in the Woods" until our ultimate and inevitable collapse
into tears!

So Percy, who is not without his spirit of ragging, told several
whoppers, which he later confessed came from the Society of Psychical
Research records. And I huskily recounted Uncle Carlton's story of the
neurasthenic lady patient who went into a doctor's office and there
beheld a skull standing on his polished rosewood desk. Then, as she sat
staring at it, this skull started to move slowly toward her. It later
turned out to be only a plaster-of-Paris paper weight, and a mouse had
got inside it and found a piece of cracker there--and a cracker, I had
to explain to Percy, was the name under which a biscuit usually
masqueraded in America. That mouse, in its efforts to get the last of
that cracker, had, of course, shifted the skull along the polished wood.

This reminded Dinky-Dunk of the three medical students who had tried to
frighten their landlady's daughter by smuggling an arm from the
dissecting room and hiding it under the girl's pillow. Dinky-Dunk even
solemnly avowed that the three men were college chums of his. They
waited to hear the girl's scream, but as there was nothing but silence
they finally stole into the room. And there they saw the girl sitting on
the floor, holding the arm in her hands. As she sat there she was
mumbling to herself and eating one end of it! Of course the poor thing
had gone stark staring mad.

Olie groaned audibly at this and wiped his forehead with his
coat-sleeve. But before he could get away Terry started to tell of the
four-bottle Irish sea captain who was sober only when at sea and one
night in port stumbled up to bed three sheets in the wind. When he had
navigated into what he thought was his own room he was astounded to find
a man already in bed there, and even dru