ent just then of a party of
counterfeiters and were suspicious of the sounds and lights in this
apparently unoccupied dwelling. But they watched and waited in vain. One
of them got a scare and that was all. The mystery went unsolved and the
sign "To Let" remained indefinitely on the house-front.

At last a family from the West decided to risk the terrors of this
domicile. The nurse, whose story I was listening to, came with them
and entered upon her duties without prejudice or any sort of belief in
ghosts, general or particular. She held this belief just two weeks. Then
her incredulity began to waver. In fact, she saw the light; almost saw
the ghost, certainly saw the ghost's penumbra. It was one night, or
rather very early, one morning. She had been sitting up with the baby,
who had been suffering from a severe attack of croup. Hot water was
wanted, and she started for the kitchen for the purpose of making a fire
and putting on the kettle. The gas had not been lit in the hall--they
had all been too busy, and she was feeling her way down the front
stairs with a box of matches in her hand, when suddenly she heard from
somewhere below a sound which she could never describe, and at the same
moment saw a light which spread itself through all the lower hall so
that every object stood out distinctly.

She did not think of the ghost at first, her thoughts were so full of
the child; but when a board creaked in the hall floor, a board that
always creaked when stepped on, she remembered the reputation and what
had been told her about a creaking board and a light that came and went
without human agency. Frightened for a minute, she stood stock-still,
then she rushed down. Whatever it was, natural or supernatural, she went
to see it; but the light vanished before she passed the lower stair, and
only a long-drawn sigh not far from her ear warned her that the space
between her and the real hall was not the solitude she was anxious to
consider it. A sigh! That meant a person. Striking a match, she looked
eagerly down the hall. Something was moving between the two walls.
But when she tried to determine its character, it was swallowed up in
darkness,--the match had gone out. Anxious for the child and determined
to go her way to the kitchen, she now felt about for the gas-fixture and
succeeded in lighting up. The whole hall again burst into view but the
thing was no longer there; the space was absolutely empty. And so were
the other roo