on.

"Well," I said at length when decency told me that I could remain no
longer, "if you won't sell it's no use my looking. No doubt you want to
keep it for a richer man, and of course you are quite right. Will you
arrange with the carrier about sending the clock, Mr. Potts, and I will
let you have a cheque. Now I must be off, as I've ten miles to ride and
it will be dark in an hour."

"Stop where you are," said Potts in a hollow voice. "What's a ride in
the dark compared with a matter like this, even if you haven't a lamp
and get hauled before your own bench? Stop where you are, I'm listening
to something."

So I stopped and began to fill my pipe.

"Put that pipe away," said Potts, coming out of his reverie, "pipes mean
matches; no matches here."

I obeyed, and he went on thinking till at last what between the chest
and the worm-eaten Jacobean bed and old Potts on the prayer-stool, I
began to feel as if I were being mesmerized. At length he rose and said
in the same hollow voice:

"Young man, you may have that chest, and the price is L50. Now for
heaven's sake don't offer me L40, or it will be L100 before you leave
this room."

"With the contents?" I said casually.

"Yes, with the contents. It's the contents I'm told you are to have."

"Look here, Potts," I said, exasperated, "what the devil do you mean?
There's no one in this room except you and me, so who can have told you
anything unless it was old Tom downstairs."

"Tom," he said with unutterable sarcasm, "Tom! Perhaps you mean the
mawkin that was put up to scare birds from the peas in the garden, for
it has more in its head than Tom. No one here? Oh! what fools some men
are. Why, the place is thick with them."

"Thick with whom?"

"Who? why, ghosts, of course, as you would call them in your ignorance.
Spirits of the dead I name them. Beautiful enough, too, some of them.
Look at that one there," and he lifted the lantern and pointed to a pile
of old bed posts of Chippendale design.

"Good day, Potts," I said hastily.

"Stop where you are," repeated Potts. "You don't believe me yet, but
when you are as old as I am you will remember my words and believe--more
than I do and see--clearer than I do, because it's in your soul, yes,
the seed is in your soul, though as yet it is choked by the world, the
flesh, and the devil. Wait till your sins have brought you trouble; wait
till the fires of trouble have burned the flesh away; wait till you have
sought