How long we had slumbered I cannot say; it seemed but a moment when a door opened in our dreams, and the face of Mr. Tebbutts was developed before me in the air like the face of the Cheshire cat, only without the grin. "Mr. Knox! Gentlemen!" he began, as if he were addressing a meeting. The thunder had left his voice; he stopped to take breath. He was in his shirt and trousers, and the laces of his boots trailed on the floor behind him. "I've 'ad a bit of a start upstairs. I was just winding up my watch at the dressing-table when I saw some kind of an animal gloide past the fireplace and across the room----" "What was it like?" interrupted Flurry, sitting up in his chair. "Well, Mr. Knox, it's 'ard to say what it was like. It wasn't a cat, nor yet it wasn't what you could call a squirrel----" Flurry got on to his feet. "By the living Jingo!" he said, turning to me an awestruck countenance; "he's seen the Aussolas Martin Cat!" I had never before heard of the Aussolas Martin Cat, and it is indisputable that a slight chill crept down my backbone. Mr. Tebbutts' eyes bulged more than ever, and his lower lip fell. "What way did it go?" said Flurry; "did it look at you?" "It seemed to disappear in that recess by the door," faltered the seer of the vision; "it just vanished!" "I don't know if it's for my grandmother or for me," said Flurry in a low voice, "but it's a death in the house anyway." The colour in Mr. Tebbutts' face deepened to a glossy sealing-wax red. "If one of you gents would come upstairs with me," he said, "I think I'll just get my traps together. I can be back at the 'otel in 'alf an 'our----" Flurry and I accompanied Mr. Tebbutts to the James the Second room. Over Mrs. Knox's door there were panes of glass, and light came forth from them. (It is my belief that Mrs. Knox never goes to bed.) We trod softly as we passed it, and went along the uncarpeted boards of the Musicians' Gallery above the entrance hall. There certainly was a peculiar odour in the James the Second room, and the adjective "charnel-'ouse" had not been misapplied. I thought about a dead rat, and decided that the apparition had been one of the bandit tribe of tawny cats that inhabited the Aussolas stables. And yet legends of creatures that haunted old houses and followed old families came back to me; of one in particular, a tale of medieval France, wherein "a yellow furry animal" ran down the throat of a sleeping lady named Sagesse.