During the long days we spent together Piatte delighted to speak of his home; he belonged to the country, where he drove a diligence: he loved horses and animals, and he was still full of old and quaint superstitions. "I was seventeen," he once said to me, "when I drove a coach for the first time, and I shall never forget that night. I had never driven the coach except to bring it round from the stables to the inn, when one night the governor orders the diligence to be got ready for a foreign gentleman who wanted to catch a train twenty miles from our place. All the other carriages were out, and the diligence alone was available. When Jean-Paul, the usual driver, hears of it he says that he will not drive it for all the money in the world, it being a Friday night in the month of January. 'Why?' I asked him. He told me that at one place where the road meets the Strasbourg road there was a ghost which always came out from behind a tree when the diligence passed along at night on a Friday in January: 'his grandfather, his father, and him too had seen it, and he did not want to see it no more.' I didn't believe much in ghosts, so I offered to drive, and my governor, to whom the coach belonged, let me go. The horses were fresh, the carriage light, and we were rattling along at a good pace when all of a sudden I see a woman dressed in white jump from behind a tree and stand in the middle of the road. 'Hi! hi! look out!' I shout, but she did not seem to heed me, and before I could pull up the leaders were on her. They shied and reared, but there she rises between the two of them and seems to jump over the wheelers, and for a second or two she flitters in front of me like a huge bat. As I looked round I saw that we were just at the spot which Jean-Paul had told me was haunted. I felt my heart in my mouth, and lashing the horses put them at a gallop--and they didn't want no urging either; but the ghost seemed to fly in the air alongside the coach for a distance of about a hundred yards, when she disappeared in a bush." I told Piatte that it was the effect of his imagination, but he was positive about it; according to him the ghost had the face of a young girl with very dark hair, and was draped in white garments with a kind of hood over her head. Soon after his first adventure he became the regular driver of the diligence, the former driver having been upset with the coach and killed on the spot. During the year previous to his military service he had worked in some large engineering works, and he always swore to me that until he was first punished he had never been drunk, adding at the same time that during the fourteen months he had still to serve he meant to drink whenever he could get a chance. I thoroughly believe that if he had become a Corporal he would have been one of the best men in the regiment, and there is no doubt that it was the injustice with which he had been treated which led him to drink and degradation.