he had kept
watch in the house on two separate occasions, abstaining from sleep
until daylight appeared at seven o'clock, but without hearing a
sound."

The under gardener's experience of two nights is as exhaustive of the
subject as that of _The Times_ correspondent and his friends, who also
remained two nights, but do not allege that they "abstained from
sleep."

Mr. "Etienne" was the last guest at B----, and arrived the evening
before the house was vacated. He afterwards told Lord Bute that he had
brought, without the knowledge of any one in the house, two seismic
instruments, but that they recorded nothing, and that during the night
he heard a sound as of a gun being fired outside the house. This he
attributed to some poacher unknown, an explanation which seems hardly
probable, as at this time of year there is nothing to shoot except
rabbits. One never hears of a poacher shooting rabbits, and in any
case, he would hardly do so in the immediate neighbourhood of an
inhabited house, and discharging his gun once only.

Mr. "Etienne's" experiments are the more interesting because that
among many suggestions made by Sir J. Crichton Browne, the only one
which had not been already considered, was the use of seismic
instruments. This--the house being within the seismic area--seemed so
reasonable, that Miss Freer at once entered into correspondence with
the well-known Professor Milne, with a view to experiment in this
direction. The following is from his reply:--

"_May 15th, 1897._--I was much interested in your note of the 13th,
and fancy that the sounds with which you have to deal may be of
seismic origin. Such sounds I have often heard, and the air waves, if
not the earth waves, can be mechanically recorded. What you require to
make the records is a seismograph with large but exceeding light
indices, or a Perry tromometer.... The reason I think that the sounds
are seismic is, first, on account of their character, and secondly,
because you are in one of the most unstable parts of Great Britain,
where between 1852 and 1890, 465 shocks (many with sounds) were
recorded. Lady Moncrieff, when living at Comrie House in 1844, often
heard rumblings and moanings, and such sounds, possibly akin to the
'barisal guns'[H] of Eastern England, often occur without a shake. The
mechanism of this production may be due to slight movements on a fault
face, and they may be heard, especially in rocky districts, in very
many countries....