We had a great number of Irishmen in our regiment--brave as lions in action, at all times clever and smart in the performance of their duty, and as merry as crickets in the barrack-room or on the line of march; but some of them, enlisted from the remote country districts, very superstitious and firm believers in ghosts. A tale is handed down from regiment to regiment to the effect that the ghost of a soldier once flogged to death in Hounslow Riding-school haunts the place every night. I have been on sentry on what is called the "Hospital Post," near to the riding-school, very many times, but I never saw or heard anything of the ghost. One man I knew, who had been tolerably well educated, and who, I consider, was by no means short of common intelligence, frequently declared to me that he has, while on guard on this particular post, heard noises in the riding-school just after the clock over the front of the officers' quarters had struck twelve, as though a ride of twenty or more soldiers were in the school. He asserted that he heard the regular beat of the horses' hoofs on the floor, the tinkling of the scabbards on the stirrup-irons, and the shouts of the rough-riders. This was supposed to arise from the ghost of a man who had been killed some years previously by a horse rearing and falling backwards upon him. At other times, both he and many others would say, when they were relieved from the post and afterwards sat round the guard-room fire, that they had plainly heard the shrieks of the man's ghost who was flogged to death. One of our men, who had been little more than a year in the regiment, having been sent by our Irish recruiting party from the county Mayo, and rejoicing in the rather funny name of Barney Mulgruddery, created quite a sensation in the regiment by the apparent sincerity with which he related an interview with one of these ghosts or some other spectra.