I returned the book, looking, I suppose, a little blank, as the lady laughed merrily at my discomfiture. “It’s far more exciting than some of the modern ghosts, I assure you! Now there was a Ghost last month—I don’t mean a _real_ Ghost in—in Supernature—but in a Magazine. It was a perfectly _flavourless_ Ghost. It wouldn’t have frightened a mouse! It wasn’t a Ghost that one would even offer a chair to!” “Three score years and ten, baldness, and spectacles, have their advantages after all!” I said to myself. “Instead of a bashful youth and maiden, gasping out monosyllables at awful intervals, here we have an old man and a child, quite at their ease, talking as if they had known each other for years! Then you think,” I continued aloud, “that we ought _sometimes_ to ask a Ghost to sit down? But have we any authority for it? In Shakespeare, for instance—there are plenty of ghosts _there_—does Shakespeare ever give the stage-direction ‘_hands chair to Ghost_’?” The lady looked puzzled and thoughtful for a moment: then she _almost_ clapped her hands. “Yes, yes, he _does_!” she cried. “He makes Hamlet say ‘_Rest, rest, perturbed Spirit!_’” “And that, I suppose, means an easy-chair?” “An American rocking-chair, I _think_——” “Fayfield Junction, my Lady, change for Elveston!” the guard announced, flinging open the door of the carriage: and we soon found ourselves, with all our portable property around us, on the platform. The accommodation, provided for passengers waiting at this Junction, was distinctly inadequate—a single wooden bench, apparently intended for three sitters only: and even this was already partially occupied by a very old man, in a smock frock, who sat, with rounded shoulders and drooping head, and with hands clasped on the top of his stick so as to make a sort of pillow for that wrinkled face with its look of patient weariness. “Come, you be off!” the Station-master roughly accosted the poor old man. “You be off, and make way for your betters! This way, my Lady!” he added in a perfectly different tone. “If your Ladyship will take a seat, the train will be up in a few minutes.” The cringing servility of his manner was due, no doubt, to the address legible on the pile of luggage, which announced their owner to be “Lady Muriel Orme, passenger to Elveston, _viâ_ Fayfield Junction.” As I watched the old man slowly rise to his feet, and hobble a few paces down the platform, the lines came to my lips:— “From sackcloth couch the Monk arose, With toil his stiffen’d limbs he rear’d; A hundred years had flung their snows On his thin locks and floating beard.” [Illustration: ‘COME, YOU BE OFF!’]