I think, without doubt, that the chuckle, no less than the head, must be attributed to the malignant Banshee. I may add, perhaps, without digressing too much, that supernatural happenings, apart from the Banshee, were associated with both my parents' deaths. On the night following my father's murder, and on every subsequent night for a period of six weeks, my mother and the servants were aroused regularly at twelve o'clock by a sound, as of someone hammering down the lids of packing-cases, issuing from the room in the basement of the house, which my father had always used as a study. They then heard footsteps ascending the stairs and pausing outside each bedroom in turn, which they all recognised as my father's, and, occasionally, my old nurse used to see the door of the night nursery open, and a light, like the light of a candle outside, whilst at the same time she would hear, proceeding from the landing, a quick jabber, jabber, jabber, as of someone talking very fast, and trying very hard to say something intelligible. No one was ever seen when this voice and the footsteps, said to be my father's, were heard, but this circumstance may be accounted for by the fact that my father, just before leaving Ireland, had remarked to my mother that, should anything happen to him abroad, he would in his spirit appear to her; and she, growing pale at the mere thought, begged him to do no such thing, whereupon he had laughingly replied: "Very well then, I will find some other means of communicating with you." Many manifestations of a similar nature to the foregoing, and also, like the foregoing, having nothing to do with the Banshee, occurred immediately after the death of my mother, but of these I must give an account on some future occasion. Years passed, and nothing more was seen or heard of the Banshee till I was grown up. After leaving school I went to Dublin to read with Dr Chetwode Crawley, in Ely Place, for the Royal Irish Constabulary, and I might, I think, have passed into that Force, had it not been for the fact that at the preliminary medical examination some never-to-be-forgotten and, as I thought then, intensely ill-natured doctor, rejected me. Accordingly, I never entered for the literary, but returned home thoroughly dispirited, and faced with the urgent necessity of at once looking around for something to do. However, in a very short time I had practically settled on going to America to a ranch out West (a most disastrous venture as it subsequently proved to be), and it was immediately after I had reached this decision that my first actual experience with what I believe to have been the malevolent family Banshee occurred. It happened in the same house in which the other supernatural occurrences had taken place. All the family, saving myself, were away at the time, and I was the sole occupant of one of the landings, the servants being all together on another floor.