I must have been dreaming all the time, for, though I was in deadly fear of I knew not what, it never occurred to me to get up and see what awful being it was that was standing so mysteriously outside my room. But the whole thing was so vivid that the next morning I asked the housekeeper who had occupied the room above me that night. Her answer was that the room had been empty and locked and the key in her possession. When I got back to London I told my father what I had heard. He was a good deal startled, and replied that one of his grandfather’s eccentricities had been, after a long day’s literary work, to go up into an empty upstairs room and pull a heavy trunk about for exercise. I had never, so far as I knew, heard this before; but it is possible, if it be true that in our sleep we sometimes remember things long since forgotten, that I might in years gone by have been told of the old man’s whim, and that the fact of sleeping in that house struck some chord of a vanished memory; as my father spoke, it almost seemed as if my presence had roused the spirit of the forefather to come and see what manner of creature his great-grandson might be. I insert the story for the benefit of the professors of oneiromancy. To me it seems a curious specimen of dream mystification. The historian’s eldest son, Henry, was a captain in the Royal Navy. He was twice married. By his first wife, the daughter of Anthony Wyke, Attorney-General of Montserrat, he had a son and two daughters, of whom only one, Frances, was alive in my time. She married her cousin, Bertram Mitford, the head of the family and Squire of Mitford, which she occupied after his death as a dower house; and so it happened that as a boy I passed many happy holidays in the old home. My grandfather’s second wife was Mary Leslie-Anstruther, whom he married in 1803. In the same year he was appointed to the command of H.M.S. _York_, and before commissioning her he went down with his navigating officer—master was the title in those days—to survey her. They reported her unseaworthy. To that, the answer was, in effect, “Sail, or resign your commission.” Of course they sailed, and on Christmas Eve, 1803, in a fog in the North Sea, the _York_ went down with all hands. Her guns of distress were heard, but no help was forthcoming. I have been told that one spar with “York” upon it was washed ashore on the coast of Yorkshire. There were not then the means that there are now, thanks to Lloyd’s and modern inventions, of obtaining information as to wrecks, and that single spar was, I believe, the solitary evidence of the fate of the _York_. It was something very like an official murder.