"I was not frightened, sir, in the sense that you, perhaps, put the question. I was surprised, startled. As I might have been surprised and startled at seeing anybody I least expected to see--somebody that I had thought was miles away. Since poor Rachel's death, sir, I have lived, so to say, in communion with spirits. What with Robin's talking of his hope to see _hers_, and my constantly thinking of her; knowing also that it can't be long, in the course of nature, before I am one myself, I have grown to be, as it were, familiar with the dead in my mind. Thus, sir, in that sense, no fear came upon me last night. I don't think, sir, I should feel fear at meeting or being alone with a spirit, any more than I should at meeting a man. But I was startled and disturbed." "Matthew," cried Mr. Bourne, in some perplexity, "I had always believed you superior to these foolish things. Ghosts might do well enough for the old days, but the world has grown older and wiser. At any rate, the greater portion of it has." "If you mean, sir, that I was superior to the belief in ghosts, you are right. I never had a grain of faith in such superstition in my life; and I have tried all means to convince my son what folly it was of him to hover round about the Willow Pond, with any thought that Rachel might 'come again.' No, sir, I have never been given to it." "And yet you deliberately assure me, Matthew, that you saw a ghost last night!" "Sir, that it was Mr. Frederick Massingbird, dead or alive, that I saw, I must hold to. We know that he is dead, sir, his wife buried him in that far land; so what am I to believe? The face looked ghastly white, not like a person's living." Mr. Bourne mused. That Frederick Massingbird was dead and buried, there could not be the slightest doubt. He hardly knew what to make of old Matthew. The latter resumed. "Had I been flurried or terrified by it, sir, so as to lose my presence of mind, or if I was one of those timid folks that see signs in dreams, or take every white post to be a ghost, that they come to on a dark night, you might laugh at and disbelieve me. But I tell it to you, sir, as you say, deliberately; just as it happened. I can't have much longer time to live, sir; but I'd stake it all on the truth that it was the spirit of Mr. Frederick Massingbird. When you have once known a man, there are a hundred points by which you may recognise him, beyond possibility of being mistaken. They have got a story in the place, sir, to-day--as you may have heard--that my poor child's ghost appeared to Dan Duff last night, and that the boy has been senseless ever since. It has struck me, sir, that perhaps he also saw what I did." Mr. Bourne paused. "Did you say anything of this to Mr. Verner?"