We had been talking and reading in my tiny sitting-room till about eleven o’clock, when my vagabond friend bade me a sleepy “Good night” and opened the front door. He had, however, only just put his foot on the cobbles when he stepped backwards with a sharp exclamation, and a scared look on his face. “What’s up?” I asked. “It’s awfully queer,” he replied; “I could have sworn I saw a face looking straight at me close to that bush”--he pointed to the privet hedge at the left of the door--“but there didn’t seem to be any body to it. I’m certainly not drunk, but I may have been dreaming.” After my recent experience, which I had not thought it worth while to mention to such a hard-headed soul as my chance companion, I felt anything but comfortable. We were both rather ashamed of our brief lapse from common sense, and laughed the incident off as best we might. The following day found me in all the doubtful glory of my solitude once more, and I must confess to having been thankful when an invitation reached me that same evening, from friends at Fambridge, for a few days’ fishing. I have never suffered from that popular present-day malady known as “nerves,” possibly because of an open-air existence with plenty of exercise, but, though I had only been there a short time, the cottage and the locality now seemed to have become almost uncanny to me. Had I mixed more with the inhabitants, I should have discovered, as I did later, that this strange feeling was not without some foundation. The few days I spent in Fambridge put all thought of the two queer incidents out of my mind, which will show that the subsequent events were not the outcome of an overtaxed imagination or a course of long brooding upon disquieting phenomena. It must have been about nine o’clock in the evening that my Fambridge friend put a little Welsh pony into his governess-car to drive me back the four odd miles to my cottage. The night was fine, but there were clouds about and no moon, so that objects outside the radius of the lamps were hard to distinguish. The pony had already had a fairly hard day of it along the coast, but he was a sturdy little beast and pulled like a steam-engine, rattling us down to the outskirts of Canewdon in excellent time.