o go, saying he had
another appointment, but promised to call again in the afternoon with a
sleeping draught, and hoped his patient would be quite well in the
morning.

I accompanied him to the inn door, and went down the street with him.

'Tell me,' I said, 'exactly what you do think, for if I mistake not you
were purposely reticent with my friend just now.'

'I was,' he said, after a pause, 'because I had reasons. Promise not to
mention to your friend either now or at any time later----' I gave the
required promise, and waited eagerly for his response.

'Well,' he said slowly, 'I once got a "gliff" myself in exactly the same
place as I made a short cut through the churchyard one autumn evening. I
was not thinking of the dead Warden or the tomb in the transept, and yet
'twas none other that I saw.'

Then he added gravely, 'These things are not good for the nerves.
Wherefore I would advise you to take your friend off as soon as
possible, and don't let him visit the churchyard again.'

CASTLE ICHABOD

'When you saw the dog, my dear,' said my uncle, the Rector, to his wife,
'almost exactly, if I remember right, a year ago this month of November,
what sort of size and colour was it, again? I remember it growled
terribly on the top of the wall by the mausoleum, and I thought it must
have been a retriever, from your description of it, but it ought really
as a wraith to have been a collie,' and here my uncle slightly
contracted his left eye in my direction.

'I think it must have been a retriever, John,' replied my aunt gravely,
yet I thought a waft from her eye stole towards me as she spoke, 'for
"Geordie" swears it was a tarrible great savage durg; but it may be, of
course, that he had forgotten himself and your exhortations, at the
King's Head last night, and mistaken a collie for a retriever.' I found
it difficult not to smile, for, if my uncle had been 'pulling my aunt's
leg' she was certainly twitching his cassock. This was a 'parlour game'
at the Rectory, as I discovered later, and one in which my aunt always
came off the winner.

My uncle now addressed himself to me. 'You must know, Charles,' said he,
'that the northern part of the Castle Park, between the burn and the
ring wall, is supposed to be haunted by the wraiths of a shepherd and
his collie dog. He was taking a short cut home from our village to the
big moor farm beyond the common, and was probably suffering from the old
disease of the north