I walked half-way to the door, momentarily expecting to have him call me back; but he didn't. I had to give him a parting shot. "You probably belong to a ghost union--don't you? That's your secret? Ordered out on strike, and won't do any haunting after sundown unless some other employer of unskilled ghosts pays his spooks skilled wages." I had half a notion that the word "spook" would draw him out, for I have noticed that ghosts do not like to be called spooks any more than negroes like to be called "niggers." They consider it vulgar. He never yielded in his reserve, however, and after locking up I went to bed. For a time I could not sleep, and I began to wonder if I had been just, after all. Possibly there was no spirit within miles of me. The symptoms were all there, but might not that have been due to my depressed condition--for it does depress a writer to have one of his best veins become sclerotic--I asked myself, and finally, as I went off to sleep, I concluded that I had been in the wrong all through, and had imagined there was something there when there really was not. "Very likely the ringing of the bell was due to the wind," I said, as I dozed off. "Of course it would take a very heavy wind to blow the button in, but then--" and then I fell asleep, convinced that no ghost had ventured within a mile of me that night. But when morning came I was undeceived. Something must have visited us that Christmas Eve, and something very terrible; for while I was dressing for breakfast I heard my wife calling loudly from below. [Illustration: "IT HAD TURNED WHITE"] "Henry!" she cried. "Please come down here at once." "I can't. I'm only half shaved," I answered. "Never mind that," she returned. "Come at once." So, with the lather on one cheek and a cut on the other, I went below. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Look at that!" she said, pointing to my grandmother's hair-sofa, which stood in the hall just outside of my library door. It had been black when we last saw it, but as I looked I saw that a great change had come over it. _It had turned white in a single night!_ Now I can't account for this strange incident, nor can any one else, and I do not intend to try. It is too awful a mystery for me to attempt to penetrate, but the sofa is there in proof of all that I have said concerning it, and any one who desires can call and see it at any time. It is not necessary for them to see me; they need only ask to see the sofa, and it will be shown. We have had it removed from the hall to the white-and-gold parlor, for we cannot bear to have it stand in any of the rooms we use. THE MYSTERY OF BARNEY O'ROURKE