Jeannette, you thought your old friend, though strange and odd,
pure and innocent. It is a bitter part of my punishment that I must
change your thought of me. Farewell! Do not fail me, and I shall trouble
you no more. But whenever you hear that wind howl and sweep round the
house as it does to-night, know that the lost are near. It is their
swift flight through space--fleeing before the scourge of memory and
conscience--that causes that sound. “That to-morrow you may not think you are dreaming, here is a token,”
and she touched the palm of my hand with her finger-tips, and as you
see, my child, to this day, there are three crimson spots in the palm of
my hand that nothing will eradicate. “Do not fail me, and pray for us, Jeannette, pray,” and with a longing,
wistful gaze, and a deep, sobbing sigh, Nancy Black faded from my sight. “Am I dreaming?” I exclaimed, as I rose from my chair and rang the bell. When the servant entered, I bade him attend to the fire and light the
lamps, and I went through the room to see if any unusual arrangement of
the furniture could have caused the appearance, but nothing was
apparent, and I bade him send my maid to attend me in my chamber, for I
could not help feeling unwilling to remain in the library any longer
that evening. While making my toilet for the night my maid said:

“Have you burned your hand, madam?”

Glancing hastily down, I saw three dark crimson spots upon the palm of
my left hand. They had an odd look, seared as though touched by a
red-hot iron, yet the flesh was soft, not burned and not painful. Making
some excuse for it, I did not allude to it again, and dismissed her
speedily, that I might reflect undisturbed over the singular occurrence. There were the marks upon my hand; I could not remove them, and they did
not fade. In fact, their deep red made the rest of the palm lose its
pinkish hue and look pale from the strong contrast. Could I have been
asleep and dreamed it all, and by any means have done this to myself? I
thought, but finally concluded that on the morrow I’d go over to Nancy
Black’s old residence and settle the question; and with that conclusion
had to content myself until the morrow came. Nancy Black was an old friend from my girlhood, who had owned large
property in the town, and lived all alone in a spacious stone house
directly opposite my home, and who, when dying, had left me the sole
legatee of her property. When morning came I took the keys, and, with my maid, went over to
Nancy’s house. It had never been disturbed since her death, which was
sudden and somewhat singular, and the furniture remained just as she
left it when taken to her last resting place. We went to the room Nancy
had directed. I bade Sarah take up the carpet, and, sure enough, there
was a plank with a knot-hole in it; so I sent her from the room, and
lifted the plank myself, and there, between the two joints, rested a
long box, the lid not fastened. Opening it, I was horrified to see two
skeletons--those of an infant and of a woman, small in stature and
delicate frame. In a moment it flashed before me that I saw all that
remained of Nancy Black’s young sister, a girl of seventeen, who had
left home somewhat mysteriously years ago, and had died while absent--at
least, that was the version Nancy had given of her absence, and no one
had dreamed of doubting it, her tale was so naturally told. Left orphans when Lucy was only two years and Nancy eighteen, she had
devoted her life to the care of this young girl, and when she found her
sister had fallen, she, in her pride of name and position, had destroyed
mother and child, that her shame might not be known, and had lived all
those dreary years in that house with her fearful secret. Round the box, heaped up on every side, were money and jewels, and a
parchment scroll among them had written on it: “Lucy’s share of our
father’s estate.” I carried out Nancy’s wishes to the letter, for I now
firmly believed that she had come to me herself that night. To avoid
scandal resting on the dead, I took our clergyman into my confidence,
and with his assistance had the remains buried quietly in consecrated
ground. The money and jewels were given to the poor, and the old
building I turned into a home for destitute females; and morning and
night, as I kneel in prayer, I pray forgiveness to rest upon Nancy Black
and peace to her troubled soul. A FIGHT WITH A GHOST. BY Q. E. D.


“No, I never believed much in ghosts,” said the doctor. “But I was
always rather afraid of them.”

“Have you ever seen one?” asked one of the other men. The doctor took his cigar out of his mouth and contemplated the ash for
a moment or two before replying. “I have had some rather startling
experiences,” he said, after a pause, during which the rest of us
exchanged glances, for the doctor has seen many things and is not averse
to talking about them in congenial company. “Would you care about
hearing one of them? It gives me the cold shivers now to speak of it.”
We nodded, and the doctor, taking a sip as an antidote to the shivers,
began:

“You remember George Carson, who played for the ‘Varsity some years ago;
big chap, with a light mustache? Well, I saw a good deal of him before
he married, while he was reading for the bar in town. It was just after
he became engaged to Miss Stonor, who is now Mrs. Carson, that he asked
me to go down to a place which his people had taken in the country. Miss
Stonor was to be there and he wanted me to meet her. I could not go down
for Christmas Day, as I had promised to be with my people. But as I had
been working a bit too hard, and wanted a few days’ rest, I decided to
run down for a few days about the New Year. “Woodcote was a pleasant enough place to look at. There were two packs
of hounds within easy distance, and it was not far enough from a station
to cut you off completely from the morning papers. The Carsons had been
lucky, I thought, in coming across such a good house at such a moderate
figure. For, as George told me, the owner had been obliged to go abroad
for his health, and was anxious not to leave the place empty all the
winter. It was an old house, with big gables and preposterous corners
all over the place, and you couldn’t walk ten paces along any of the
passages without tumbling up or down stairs. But it had been patched
from time to time and, among other improvements, a big billiard-room had
been built out at the back. A country house in the winter without a
billiard-room, when the frost stops hunting, is just--well, not even a
gilded prison. The party was a small one; besides George and his father
and mother, there were only a couple of Misses Carson, who, being
somewhere in the early teens, didn’t count, and Miss Stonor, who, of
course, counted a good deal, and, lastly, myself. “Miss Stonor ought to have been happy, for George Carson, besides being
an excellent fellow all around, was by no means a bad match, being an
only son with considerable expectations.