"Rumpus" was quite another matter, quite another order of manifestation. "Rumpus" always began when we were sound asleep, and "Rumpus" always wide awakened us. "They" came at longer intervals, about every ten days, whilst "it" came on most nights. During the summer mornings in the North, when one could often read a book in the light of a one a. m. dawn, "they" were very interesting, because when "their" hour, five a. m., arrived the room was flooded with sunshine. In winter mornings, when the room was in black darkness, we were merely bored, and cross at being roused, and we simply lay still and endured "them" till they had quite finished. But in the summer mornings we always sat up in bed and intently watched something we never saw. When "Rumpus" roused us brusquely from our slumbers it was by means of a demoniac pandemonium. The room was in possession of "them," and "they" crashed, and banged, and tossed about the furniture in the most reckless fashion. Crash went the wardrobe, bang went one chair after another, hurtling across the room. Crash went wardrobe back into its place again, clang went the fire-irons. Rushing collisions, and rappings on the window-panes, thuds on the floor, rattlings and clatterings of crockery, jingling of brass, creakings and groanings of expostulation from the old sofa, clanking of the fireguard, a veritable tornado of noise, enough surely to awaken the dead, yet out of the living it only awakened--us. No one else in the house ever heard it, and our vivid descriptions were, perhaps, naturally attributed to nightmare. We, of course, knew that it was nothing of the sort. We were, indeed, very wide awake during the ten to fifteen minutes the pandemonium continued, and our eyes were kept darting from side to side following the track of the noises, as they grew in volume and intensity. Creak, groan, crash! No mistaking the spot where that deafening sound came from. That was the old mahogany wardrobe being hurled face downwards on the floor, but whilst our eyes were riveted on its statuesque and utter immobility jingle, clank, from the fender, where the fire-irons commenced to jig. A wildly confused uproar over all the room, then boom, thud, beneath us, and our beds shivered convulsively, and sent thrills of wild excitement coursing through our nerves. Suddenly the tumult would cease. The mystery lay in the fact that we never saw anything move, though we distinctly heard everything moving, and could feel our beds reel beneath us. I have no explanations to offer of those happenings. They are very clearly fixed in my objective memory, and when we were both grown up, and had finally left that house my brother used often to say to me, "Do you remember 'Silk Dress' and 'Rumpus'?"