was doing, but I distinctly remember that, as I tugged
the door open, there was a low, gleeful chuckle, and something slipped
by me and disappeared in the direction of the corridor. At noon that day
my mother had a seizure of apoplexy, and died at midnight.

"Again there was a lapse of years--this time nearly four--when, sent on
an errand for my father, I turned the key of one of the doors leading
into the empty wing, and once again found myself within the haunted
precincts. All was just as it had been on the occasion of my last
visit--gloom, stillness and cobwebs reigned everywhere, whilst
permeating the atmosphere was a feeling of intense sadness and
depression.

"I did what was required of me as quickly as possible, and was crossing
one of the rooms to make my exit, when a dark shadow fell athwart the
threshold of the door, and I saw the cat.

* * * * *

"That evening my father dropped dead as he was hastening home through
the fields. He had long suffered from heart disease.

"After his death we--that is to say, my brother, sisters and self--were
obliged to leave the house and go out into the world to earn our living.
We never went there again, and never heard if any of the subsequent
tenants experienced similar manifestations."

This is as nearly as I can recollect Mrs. Hartnoll's story. But as it is
a good many years since I heard it, there is just a possibility of some
of the details--the smaller ones at all events--having escaped my
memory.

When I was grown up, I stayed for a few weeks near Oxenby, and met, at a
garden party, a Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler, the then occupants of the Manor
House.

I asked if they believed in ghosts, and told them I had always heard
their house was haunted.

"Well," they said, "we never believed in ghosts till we came to Oxenby,
but we have seen and heard such strange things since we have been in the
Manor House that we are now prepared to believe anything."

They then went on to tell me that they--and many of their visitors and
servants--had seen the phantasms of a very hideous and malignant old
man, clad in tight-fitting hosiery of mediaeval days, and a maimed and
bleeding big, black cat, that seemed sometimes to drop from the ceiling,
and sometimes to be thrown at them. In one of the passages all sorts of
queer sounds, such as whinings, meanings, screeches, clangings of pails
and rattlings of chains, were heard, whilst something, no one could