All was dark about him. He thought he was in bed at home. He strove to turn over,--his bed was too short,--too narrow. In amazement he began to feel about him,--there were soft velvet cushions beneath him,--heavy wood carving on either side. His heart sprang into his mouth. He had fallen asleep in Hamlet's chair. Actors and audience were gone,--he wondered that the stir of the crowd had failed to wake him. The theatre was dark and deserted, the doors were locked, and beneath the walls lay perhaps the body of a dead man. He started up trembling at the thought. The moon's pallid light fell through one of the lofty windows above the gallery and quivered in ghostly fashion upon the stage where erstwhile the filial Dane had hearkened to the hollow voice of the spectre of a murdered sire. The white glimmer gave wan and wavering glimpses of the scenery of this strange mimic world. Mountains loomed up in the clare-obscure. A painted galleon on a painted ocean was bravely sailing away, bound for nowhere. Suddenly--was that a moving shadow among the motionless shadows? Ned stared hard at it. There was no mistake. The moonlight showed an indistinct figure advancing stealthily down the stage. Far, far away a great clock struck one. The single tone, as it invaded the silence, had a weird abruptness. It sent a chill through Ned's heart. A superstitious terror had laid hold upon him. With starting eyes fixed upon the apparition, he shrank softly back into his hiding place. CHAPTER III The apparition advanced a few paces down the centre of the stage. As it stood there in the fainting shimmer of the moonbeams, its head stretched forth as if it scented the dawn, Ned could hear nothing but the tumultuous beating of his own heart. The figure paused thus only for a moment. Then it leaped into the air and cut a wiry caper. To people more conversant with the traditional manners and customs of ghosts this might seem so gross a departure from spectral etiquette as to induce doubt of the genuineness of the manifestation. But to the boy the grotesque gesture seemed horribly uncanny. He sprang from his seat--his limbs failed him and he sank back; he sought to scream--not a sound came from his dry and parched lips. "Ye're too drunk yit fur this biz, pard." A hoarse, half-suppressed voice issued from the wings. A short, thickset, bow-legged man was emerging thence, and the figure on the stage turned to meet him. "Pshaw!" said the tall apparition contemptuously. "I'm as sober as the bishop." And what was this? A familiar voice; and now that Ned looked again, a familiar figure. No ghost,--only the sorry "first player," whom Ned had imagined as lying dead outside on the flagging of the alley. "I mus' be gittin' weak in the upper story!" the boy said to himself.