Miss Octavia Hollister was a woman to be humored; we all knew this; but I realized with a pang that she was about to be disappointed. I had expected her to forget the British soldier in the perfectly tangible joy of secret springs and ghostly chambers; and if I had foreseen her persistence in clinging to the tradition of the ill-fated Briton I should have taken the trouble to hide a few bones under the flooring. Miss Octavia had brought a stick from the coal-room, and was thumping the floor with it even while Pepperton tried to discourage her further investigations. We were all ranged about her with our candles, and these, with the others I had thrust into the corners, lighted the room well. "I'm afraid you've seen the whole of it, Miss Hollister," said Pepperton. "The old house was built after the Revolution, I judge, but your British soldier was probably left hanging to a tree and never buried at all." "Mr. Pepperton," she replied, holding the candle so close to the architect that he blinked, "it would be far from me to question your knowledge of history, but I should not be at all surprised if the builder of this old house had fought on the seas with John Paul Jones, and had buried beneath these walls the very sea-chest that had been his companion on many eventful voyages." Pepperton gasped at the absurdity of this, and then suppressed his mirth with difficulty. Cecilia faintly expostulated; but I knew Miss Octavia would not be dissuaded, and I thought it as well to facilitate her search and be done with it. A sailor with rings in his ears and a cutlass dangling at his side might have come home from the wars and established himself on a farm in Westchester County and even buried his sea-chest under the floor of his house, but in all likelihood he never had. It was not my office, however, to advise Miss Octavia Hollister in such matters. Pepperton had changed his tune and seemed anxious to follow my lead. To him she was an eccentric old woman, whose wealth alone gained her indulgence in such preposterous obsessions as this; but my own feelings were those of regret that she must so quickly be disillusioned. To me she had become an incarnation of the play-spirit that never grows old, and there may have risen in me an honest belief that what this unusual woman sought she would somehow find. Once or twice when the uneven worn flooring had boomed hollowly under her stick I had knelt promptly to examine the planks, and had thus disposed of several false alarms. Pepperton feigned interest for a time, but was becoming bored. Cecilia studied the quaint pattern of the wall paper, which she said ought to be reproduced, as nothing in contemporaneous designs equaled it.