a man after all--any moment. Ah! my heart gives a great sickly jerk. Something has shot into view. There, not fifty yards from me, where the road curves, and the break in the foliage overhead admits a great flood of moonlight. I recognize the "thing" at once; it's not a man, it's nothing human, it's the picture I know so well and dread so much, the portrait of Horace Wimpole, that hangs in the main hall--and it's mounted on a coal-black horse with wildly flying mane and foaming mouth. On and on they come, thud, thud, thud! The man is not dressed as a rider, but is wearing the costume in the picture--i.e. that of a macaroni! A nut! More fit for a lady's seminary than a fine, old English mansion. "Something beside me rustles--rustles angrily, and I know, I can feel, it is the bundle on the branch--the ghastly, groaning, creaking, croaking caricature of Sir Algernon. The horseman comes up to me--our eyes meet--I am looking in those of a dead--of a long since dead man--my blood freezes. "He flashes past me--thud, thud, thud! A bend in the road, and he vanishes from sight. But I can still hear him, still hear the mad patter of his horse's hoofs as they bear him onward, lifeless, fleshless, weightless, to his ancient home. God pity the souls that know no rest. "How I got back to the house I hardly know. I believe it was with my eyes shut, and I am certain I ran all the way. "About four o'clock the following afternoon I received a cablegram from Malta. Intuition warned me to prepare for the worst. Its contents were unpleasantly short and pithy--'Hal drowned at two o'clock this morning.--Dick.' "Two years passed--again an August night, hot and oppressive as before, and again--though surely against my will, my better judgment, if you like--I visited the wood. Horse's hoofs just the same as before. The same galloping, the same figure, the same EYES! the same mad, panic-stricken flight home, and, early in the succeeding afternoon, a similar cablegram--this time from Sicily. 'Dick died at midnight. Dysentery.--Andrews.'