A fireplace was close to me as I stood at the far end of the room, looking down the whole length of the table. Glancing up, I realised that the only picture in the room was hung over this fireplace. The picture in question had no artistic value--the painting was flat and poor; even the subject did not strike me for the first moment as anything very remarkable. It was the portrait of a man in the prime of life--about thirty-five, I should have supposed--with the long whiskers and rather prim pose of a portrait made by an evidently poor artist, probably thirty or forty years previous to my visit. But as I looked again, a curious sensation came over me. In spite of the painter's failure to convey anything more like a living man than a dead pressed rose is like a living rose, there was something in the eyes of the portrait that held me, something that rose triumphant above the artist's limitations. At the same moment I was conscious of a Presence behind my back; of _somebody who was looking at the picture with me_; of somebody who was saying to me (not with the outer, but an inner voice): "_That is a picture of me, but I am not there--I am here, close to you; behind your shoulder--I am looking at it with you._" The impression was so strong that it seemed almost as if a hand were pressing on my shoulder. I turned round involuntarily, but no one was there. Then I looked at the picture again, and always with the same weird sensation that the man whom the picture represented had been strong enough to make me feel his actual presence in the room, although I could see nothing. There was no name on the picture of either subject or artist, no possible clue to identity, and looked at as a picture alone, there was nothing in the flat, conventional presentment of the features to account for my experience. This made it the more remarkable. I could scarcely tear myself away from the almost overwhelming sense of the presence of some strong and strangely magnetic personality, but the fast fading twilight warned me not to risk an ignominious retreat. So I went hurriedly through the large and handsome drawing-room, which was filled with portraits, chiefly of deceased governors and generals, many of them admirably painted, and a striking contrast to the one poor and commonplace picture already seen. The absolute incongruity between the impression received and the object which roused it, led me to make inquiries, in spite of my friend's jokes over my powers of imagination. "Anyway, I am going to clear this up," I said with determination; and in a few days my perseverance was rewarded, and my impression amply justified, by finding that I had been looking at the portrait--feeble and poor as it was--of _Brigadier-General Nicholson_. None of my readers need to be told that if any dead man could impress himself upon the living, this would be the man capable of such a feat.