e it, when you look down from the second gallery of the
bell-tower at Fourvieres, following the bend of the outstretched golden
arm of Notre Dame.

The chateau was pulled down some years ago, and there is no trace of its
former existence among the vines.

Good times, and bad times, and again good times have come for the Croix
Rousse, for Lyons, and for France, since then; but the remembrance of
the treachery of Pichon & Sons, and of the retribution which at once
exposed and punished their crime, outlives all changes. And once, every
year, on a certain summer night, three ghostly figures are seen, by any
who have courage and patience to watch for them, gliding along by the
foot of the boundary-wall, two of them carrying a dangling corpse, and
the other, implements for mason's work and a small leather valise.
Giraudier, _pharmacien_, has never seen these ghostly figures, but he
describes them with much minuteness; and only the _esprits forts_ of the
Croix Rousse deny that the ghosts of Pichon & Sons are not yet laid.

THE PHANTOM FOURTH.

They were three.

It was in the cheap night-service train from Paris to Calais that I
first met them.

Railways, as a rule, are among the many things which they do _not_ order
better in France, and the French Northern line is one of the worst
managed in the world, barring none, not even the Italian _vie ferrate_.
I make it a rule, therefore, to punish the directors of, and the
shareholders in, that undertaking to the utmost within my limited
ability, by spending as little money on their line as I can help.

It was, then, in a third-class compartment of the train that I met the
three.

Three as hearty, jolly-looking Saxon faces, with stalwart frames to
match, as one would be likely to meet in an hour's walk from the
Regent's Park to the Mansion House.

One of the three was dark, the other two were fair. The dark one was the
senior of the party. He wore an incipient full beard, evidently in
process of training, with a considerable amount of grizzle in it.

The face of one of his companions was graced with a magnificent flowing
beard. The third of the party, a fair-haired youth of some twenty-three
or four summers, showed a scrupulously smooth-shaven face.

They looked all three much flushed and slightly excited, and, I must
say, they turned out the most boisterous set of fellows I ever met.

They were clearly gentlemen, however, and men of education, with
considerabl