pocket-book."

Meanwhile I too had alighted; then struck a match, and by its light we
discovered, through the open door, the "load" huddled confusedly on the
floor of the hack, face upward, his chin compressed upon his breast by
his leaning against the further door, and looking altogether vulgar,
misshapen, and miserably unlike a soldier. He neither moved nor spoke
when we called. We hastily clambered within and lifted him upon the
seat, but his head rolled about with an awful looseness and freedom,
and another match disclosed a ghastly dead face and wide eyes that
stared horribly at nothing.

"You would better drive the body to headquarters," I said.

Instead of following, I cantered back to town, housed my horse, and
went straightway to bed; and this will prove to be the first
information that I was the "mysterious man on a horse," whom the
coroner could never find.

About a year afterwards I received the following letter (which is
observed to be in fair English) from Stockholm, Sweden:

"Dear Sir,--For some years I have been reading your remarkable
psychological studies with great interest, and I take the liberty
to suggest a theme for your able pen. I have just found in a
library here a newspaper, dated about a year ago, in which is an
account of the mysterious death of a military officer in a hack."

Then followed the particulars, as I have already detailed them, and the
very theme of post-mortem revenge which I have adopted in this setting
out of facts. Some persons may regard the coincidence between my
correspondent's suggestion and my private and exclusive knowledge as
being a very remarkable thing; but there are likely even more wonderful
things in the world, and at none of them do I longer marvel. More
extraordinary still is his suggestion that in the dynamite explosion a
dog or a quarter of beef might as well have been employed as a
suicide-minded man; that, in short, the man may not have killed himself
at all, but might have employed a presumption of such an occurrence to
render more effective a physical persecution ending in murder by the
living man who had posed as a spirit. The letter even suggested an
arrangement with a spirit medium, and I regard that also as a queer
thing.

The declared purpose of this letter was to suggest material for another
of my "psychological studies;" but I submit that the whole affair is of
too grave a character for treatment in the levity of ficti