“I know a boy in our village that they served out like that,” interposed Bill Simms, who was a country lad, and boarded in Helstonleigh. “They got a great big turnip, and scooped it out and made it into a man’s face, and put a light inside, and stuck it on a post where he had to pass at night. He was so frightened that he died.” “Cram!” ejaculated Tod Yorke. “He did, though,” repeated Simms. “They knew him before for an awful little coward, and they did it to have some fun out of him. He didn’t say anything at the time; didn’t scream, or anything of that sort; but after he got home he was taken ill, and the next day he died. My father was one of the jury on the inquest. He was a little chap with no father or mother--a plough-boy.” “The best thing, if you want to make a ghost,” said Tod Yorke, “is to get a tin plate full of salt and gin, and set it alight, and wrap yourself round with a sheet, and hold the plate so that the flame lights up your face. You never saw anything so ghastly. Scooped-out turnips are all bosh!” “I could bring a sheet off my bed,” said Bywater. “Thrown over my arm, they’d think at home I was bringing out my surplice. And if--” A wheezing and coughing and clanking of keys interrupted the proceedings. It was Mr. Ketch, coming to lock up the cloisters. As the boys had no wish to be fastened in, themselves, they gathered up their books, and waited in silence till the porter was close upon them. Then, with a sudden war-whoop, they sprang past him, very nearly startling the old man out of his senses, and calling forth from him a shower of hard words. The above conversation, puerile and school-boyish as it may seem, was destined to lead to results all too important; otherwise it would not have been related here. You very likely may have discovered, ere this, that this story of the Helstonleigh College boys is not merely a work of imagination, but taken from facts of real life. Had you been in the cloisters that night with the boys--and you might have been--and heard Master William Simms, who was the son of a wealthy farmer, tell the tale of a boy’s being frightened to death, you would have known it to be a true one, if you possessed any knowledge of the annals of the neighbourhood. In like manner, the project they were getting up to frighten Charles Channing, and Charles’s unfortunate propensity _to be_ frightened, are strictly true.