, there entered my mind thoughts of the supernatural.

Having taken a step or two into the room, I was a little in advance of
my three friends, and as these fancies came strongly to me, I spoke over
my shoulder to one of them, who was at my right and a little behind me,
saying, half playfully:

"There ought to be ghosts in a room like this."

Hardly had I spoken when without a sound, and swinging very slowly, the
door of the large piece of furniture before me gently opened. My first
idea was that the thing must be a closet, built against the wall, with a
door at the back opening on a passageway, or into the next room, and
that the little girl whom we had met downstairs had opened it from the
other side and was coming in.

I fully expected to see her enter. But she did not enter, for, as I
learned presently, she was in the nursery at the time.

After waiting for an instant to see who was coming, I began to realize
that there was no one coming; that no one had opened the door; that,
like an actor picking up a cue, the door had begun to swing immediately
upon my saying the word "ghosts."

The appropriateness of the coincidence was striking. I turned quickly to
my friends, who were in conversation behind me, and asked:

"Speaking of ghosts--did you see that door open?"

It is my recollection that none of them had seen it. Certainly not more
than one of them had, for I remember my feeling of disappointment that
any one present should have missed so strange a circumstance. Some one
may have asked what I had seen; at all events I was full of the idea,
and, indicating the open door, I began to tell what I had seen,
when--exactly as though the thing were done deliberately to
circumstantiate my story--with the slow, steady movement of a heavy door
pushed by a feeble hand, the other portal of the huge cabinet swung
open.

This time all four of us were looking.

Presently, as we moved across the wide hall to go downstairs again,
Bryan came from one of the other chambers, whither, I think, he had
carried the young lady's supper on a tray.

"Are there supposed to be any ghosts in this house?" I asked him.

Bryan showed his white teeth in the semi-darkness. Whether he believed
in ghosts or not, evidently he did not fear them.

"Yes, sir," he said. "We're supposed to have a ghost here."

"Where?"

"In that room over there," he answered, indicating the bedroom from
which we had come.

We listened attentively to Bryan