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    More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - A Collection of Ghostly Tales (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
    More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - A Collection of Ghostly Tales (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
    More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - A Collection of Ghostly Tales (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
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    More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - A Collection of Ghostly Tales (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

    By M. R. James

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    M. R. James was born in Kent, England in 1862. James came to writing fiction relatively late, not publishing his first collection of short stories - Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) - until the age of 42. Modern scholars now see James as having redefined the ghost story for the 20th century and he is seen as the founder of the 'antiquarian ghost story'. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions with a brand new introductory biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateJan 18, 2016
    ISBN9781473379367
    More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - A Collection of Ghostly Tales (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
    Author

    M. R. James

    Montague Rhodes James was born in 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, where his father was a curate, but the family moved soon afterwards to Great Livermere in Suffolk. James attended Eton College and later King's College Cambridge where he won many awards and scholarships. From 1894 to 1908 he was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and from 1905 to 1918 was Provost of King's College. In 1913, he became Vice-Chancellor of the University for two years. In 1918 he was installed as Provost of Eton. A distinguished medievalist and scholar of international status, James published many works on biblical and historical antiquarian subjects. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1930. His ghost story writing began almost as a divertissement from his academic work and as a form of entertainment for his colleagues. His first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published in 1904. He never married and died in 1936.

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    Reviews for More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - A Collection of Ghostly Tales (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

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    • 4/5
      Ghost stories really don't get a heck of a lot better than many of these. I've listed my individual ratings for each of the 8 stories, rating some as low as 3 (surprisingly - one of which has a reputation for being among the best, The Mezzotint) - but they are all worthwhile. The particular mood and atmosphere of the reading has an impact, I suspect - - as does whether or not you have read spoilers.
      It is a pure joy to read someone write on a subject about which they are a seasoned professional (M R James being a paleographer and medievalist scholar) - and see them have a little fun with it. You can imagine the ideas coming to him as he poured over some ancient work or location and having his mind take a side trip, perhaps disturbing himself enough to encourage him to share the feeling.
      Lost Hearts strikes me as a great vehicle for Tim Burton to get morbid and stylistic with. Number 13 inadvertently became a bedtime story for my 9yr old (she listened to the first 75%, then had me tell her the ending in the morning), and Oh, Whistle is among the best of the batch (illustrated in an overly-revealing way on the cover pictured).

      As for anyone who finds the text too antiquated and bogged down with locations, history, and so forth - just trust it to pull you along, don't get hung up - context will give you all you need. If my 9yr old can follow enough to speculate on the resolution, we all can. Looking forward to more.

      "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" 5/5
      "Lost Hearts" 4/5
      "The Mezzotint" 3/5
      "The Ash-tree" 4/5
      "Number 13" 5/5
      "Count Magnus" 3/5
      "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad''" 5/5
      "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" 3/4
    • 4/5
      CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK ‘They were in the sitting-room of the house, a small, high chamber with a stone floor, full of moving shadows cast by a wood-fire that flickered on a great heart.’ (p.13)Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book was first published in 1904, although it was written in 1894.The story is set in southern France. An English tourist is photographing the interior of the cathedral of Saint-Bernard-de-Comminges at the foot of Pyrenees, when the cathedral’s sacristan tries to sell him a strange book. The Englishman is impressed by a drawing in the book. After buying it, he returns to his room, and …‘his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow. …A pen wiper? No, no such thing in the house. A rat? No, too black.A large spider? I trust to goodness not - no. …God! a hand like the hand in that picture!’ (p. 23-4)
    • 4/5
      I read Ghost Stories of an Antiquary over the course of an entire year as part of the Deal Me In Short Story Challenge. Each week I would draw a card from a deck of playing cards, and if it turned up spades, then I knew I was in for another creepy story from M.R. James. The Kindle edition I read from Open Road Media contained both the eight tales from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and the seven tales from More Ghost Stories (1911).Each and every story in this anthology was top-notch. James is a master of atmosphere, setting his tales in churchyards, labyrinths, and spooky old mansions. Many of the stories revolved around antique manuscripts or objects. According to the Wikipedia entry for M.R. James, "James perfected a method of story-telling which has since become known as Jamesian," and which includes the following elements:1. a characterful setting in an English village, seaside town or country estate; an ancient town in France, Denmark or Sweden; or a venerable abbey or university2. a nondescript and rather naive gentleman-scholar as protagonist (often of a reserved nature)3. the discovery of an old book or other antiquarian object that somehow unlocks, calls down the wrath, or at least attracts the unwelcome attention of a supernatural menace, usually from beyond the graveThat describes this collection perfectly.Coincidentally, two of the stories appeared in Alfred Hitchcock anthologies I was also reading for the Deal Me In Challenge, which gives you some idea of their quality and content. Don't pass this collection up. I especially recommend the Open Road Kindle edition, which is only 99 cents, and which has excellent formatting. You can also find these stories available online for free at Project Gutenberg.
    • 3/5
      A classic of the genre. The stories typically involve a studious bachelor gentleman staying in a slightly shabby hotel or country house, who through his antiquarian researches into an old book, print, inscription, or artefact, accidentally encounters some threatening manifestation of the occult, typically in a repellent, humanoid or quasi-animal form. The style may now be rather dry and dusty for modern taste (though familiar enough to readers of 19th century novelists such as Walter Scott or George MacDonald), but if you can match James's imagination with your own, this is well worth reading, preferably on a windy night in an old house. MB 15-iii-07
    • 4/5
      Even when reading this book for the second time the stories are good. Most of the time the ghosts or supernatural beings are not described in any detail or not at all because they stay unseen. Often this is more effective than describing every detail of horror and gore as is often the case with modern ghost/horror stories.

      At times the language is old fashioned and often more so because the narrator quotes even older texts.

      Personally, I didn't find the stories scary, but I'm not easily scared.
    • 4/5
      This volume contains eight tasty little nuggets of supernatural horror that I found very satisfying. In each of them the story is told second or even third hand by a genial narrator whose acquaintances, who are themselves of a decidedly scholarly bent, have been the victims of supernatural intrusion into our world. Often the stories revolve around an ancient artifact able to invoke the otherworldly that is discovered by these particularly luckless individuals (though they often feel themselves lucky indeed when they first make their discoveries). The tales are all good, but my favourites were “Canon Alberic's Scrap-book”, “Lost Hearts”, “”The Mezzotint”, and “Count Magnus”. I found myself thinking of both Lovecraft (in James’ use of made-up manuscripts and a reliance on protagonists of a learned bent whose curiosity proves to be their bane) and Clark Aston-Smith (though with prose that was a little less flowery) though I think James is a much better stylist than the former and a little less given to the more extreme flights of fancy of the latter.

      “Canon Alberic's Scrap-book” – An antiquary discovers a scrap-book of ancient manuscripts compiled by the titular Canon Alberic in the 17th century that is in the keeping of the sacristan of a church in France that he is studying. One picture, “The dispute of Solomon with a demon of the night”, proves to be particularly compelling…and why is the sacristan so eager to get rid of a book so obviously of great value? Great evocation of mood and the way in which the supernatural creature manifests itself was suitably creepy.

      "Lost Hearts" – A rather moving tale of revenge from beyond the grave and the perils of devoting oneself to the arcane teachings of the ancients in the hopes of gaining eternal life. I knew where this one was going pretty much after the first paragraph, but I heartily enjoyed the ride.

      "The Mezzotint" – I really liked the interesting way in which the artifact in question here, the mezzotint of the title, manifested the supernatural and the foreboding sense of a quiet yet unstoppable horror that was the result.

      "The Ash-tree" – A nobleman and his descendants find that being the star witness in a witch trial probably isn’t a good idea. Good creepy/gross factor with the creatures invoked for vengeance.

      "Number 13" – What happens when you book a room in an inn that used to belong to a man accused of having been an alchemist and magician several generations ago? Nothing good, especially if you rent the room right next to the one in which he mysteriously died. Space and time have a funny way of bending and twisting when the undead get involved.

      "Count Magnus" – The titular count reminded me a bit of Vigo the Carpathian from Ghost Busters 2; he was a mean-spirited son of a bitch who liked to torture people in his spare time and go on trips with names like “the Black Pilgrimage”. Perhaps it’s wisest if you’re a travel writer getting good copy from his native village to leave the crypt where he’s entombed alone. Just sayin’.

      "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" – Ah skeptics…they always learn their lesson in the end, don’t they? Well, they do in these kind of stories anyway. If you’re kind of a priggish and pedantic professor going on a holiday to sharpen up your golf game (golf is a re-occurring motif in these stories and I don’t think James was a fan) don’t promise to do some investigating of the local Templar preceptory for a colleague, and if you do for God’s sake don’t muck around with anything you find there. If you’re lucky you’ll run into an old military type who doesn’t trust papists.

      "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" – When the Abbot of a 16th century monastery basically dares you, though the enciphered clues he left behind in some striking stained glass windows, to uncover his hidden treasure don’t do it. Trust me on this.

      I like the way in which James gives us enough of a glimpse at the ghosts and undead horrors he unleashes in his stories to avoid Lovecraft’s almost laughable (to me at least) approach of “oh, it was so horrible I can’t even begin to describe it, just trust me it was really, really, really, mind-crushingly horrible!” and yet was sufficiently vague to leave enough of the horror to the imagination of the reader. The charming, almost homely, voice of the narrator was also a nice contrast to the ultimate invocation of otherworldly menace in the tales. All in all a really solid collection of old-school ghost stories that may not leave you cringing in terror, but you may end up looking over your shoulder from time to time. And you’ll definitely take greater care the next time that weird old manuscript seems to fortuitously land in your lap.
    • 4/5
      First published in 1904, this is a collection of spooky stories with a very Gothic feel. Several of the stories involve a traveler doing research in Scandinavia and finding that long-ago myths are real. My favorites are "Number 13", in which the traveler staying in a pleasant hotel finds that his room, number 12, sometimes has a noisy neighbor next door in 13, though the hotel owner insists there is no room 13. The most effective is "Mezzotint", in which a University student is sent a tint of an old, nameless house, but finds sinister changes to the photo every time he returns to his room.
    • 3/5
      Okay. Ghost stories are nice, but these are a bit dry and sometimes ridiculous. I was disappointed, but it's fairly good.
    • 5/5
      So far, love everything available by James. This one is no exception.
    • 4/5
      Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James
      A fantastic collection of creepy atmospheric horror tales written back in the day. I felt that these stories lost nothing with the passage of time. In fact, I appreciated the fact that these tales weren't gory at all. I guess I've gotten used to explicit scenes in my horror, and these shorts served to remind me that blood and guts don't necessarily have to play a part. My imagination often supplies something scarier than the author may have intended and I like that. I highly recommend this excellent, (free for Kindle), collection.
    • 5/5
      Full review from BadelyngeI love a good ghost story. M.R.James is one of the best at the short form of the genre. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary is packed with some of his best. All the stories here were written between 1894 and 1904 and were originally read to the author's friends at Christmas at Kings College, Cambridge where James was a noted British medieval scholar. I'd guess the best way to experience these chilling little stories would be to have them read to you on a dark night, in the depths of winter, perhaps on Christmas Eve itself. It is probably easier to imagine, listening to the words, that the story is being told to you by someone who has heard the story from another, and that such a tale might be true - just for a short time anyway. James usually cleverly distances the storyteller from the actual protagonists who are often of a scholarly type, quite sanguine (at least at first) in their rejection of the supernatural.
    • 4/5
      "Perhaps," said the landlord, with hesitation, "you gentlemen would like another room for to-night — a double-bedded one?" Neither Jensen nor Anderson was averse to the suggestion. They felt inclined to hunt in couples after their late experience. It was found convenient, when each of them went to his room to collect the articles he wanted for the night, that the other should go with him and hold the candle.Canon Alberic's Scrap-book and Lost Hearts James' protagonists tend, like himself , to be academics with antiquarian interests, who find that their interests lead them into trouble. The book starts out with three stories that didn't particularly scare me, although I seem to remember that I found them more unnerving the first time I read them. Canon Alberic seems to get off lightly in the end, and I don't believe that anybody reading Lost Hearts will be unhappy with what happens at the end. Some people deserve whatever fate vengeful ghosts may have in mind for them. The Mezzotint Although the events of this story are creepy, the protagonist has his friends to keep him company and reassure him that he is not going mad, and the portrayal of past events never seems likely to escape the confines of the picture and affect the protagonist and his friends directly. In fact, this story is quite humorous in places, with James indulging in inter-university rivalry and poking fun at golf-loving Oxford academics. The Ash Tree The rest of the stories in this book are rather more frightening. The Ash-Tree reminded me of one of those horror movies that has you are yelling at the screen when the characters do something particularly stupid and likely to get them killed. When Sir Richard (CHECK NAME) decides to move bedrooms, he finds reasons for turning down all the rooms suggested by his housekeeper, but isn't bothered by the room his grandfather died in being dark and prone to damp due the the enormous ash-tree outside. When I was a child I had a dream about spiders covering the ceiling of our playroom and streaming down the walls, so this story made me shudder in recognition.By this point in the book, I had decided that M. R. James must have really liked Queen Anne houses, as they feature in three of the first four stories, and the other story is set in France.Number 13 This story is set in a hotel in Viborg in Denmark, which may or may not have a room 13. I liked the way the room stole physical space from the rooms on either side, although their occupants seemed strangely unobservant about the change in their rooms changed size and lost one of their three windows. The source of the haunting seems to have been discovered, but the English traveller then leaves the hotel and the reader doesn't find out whether room 13 is ever seen again. The hotelier mentions having heard the unearthly shriek that comes form room 13 once before, but none of his previous guests have ever mentioned room 13 to him, so I don't think it can have appeared very often. Count Magnus, Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad and The Treasure of Abbot Thomas The last three stories return to the theme of Canon Alberic's Scrap-book, with the protagonist accidentally awakening something that would be better left undisturbed. Sometimes it leads him inexorably towards his doom, but in other stories a very frightening haunting can be stopped quite simply, so the reader can tell whether there will be a happy ending or not. In Count Magnus, the protagonist is passing the place the Count is buried when he idly says he wishes he could meet him, and takes no notice of the warning signs that follow. In the next story, a professor of ontography (the study of the essence of things) who is strongly against the occult superstitions of all types, tempts fate by blowing a whistle he finds buried in the ruins of a Templar preceptory, while the treasure hunter in the final story ignores warnings that the treasure has a guardian, even though he thinks their may be some substance in them. My favourite story is Number 13, with The Mezzotint and Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You My Lad making up my top three, while my least favourite is the Ash Tree.

    Book preview

    More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - A Collection of Ghostly Tales (Fantasy and Horror Classics) - M. R. James

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    GHOST STORIES

    OF AN ANTIQUARY

    A COLLECTION

    OF GHOSTLY TALES

    Fantasy and Horror Classics

    By

    M. R. JAMES

    First published in 1911

    Copyright © 2021 Fantasy and Horror Classics

    This edition is published by Fantasy and Horror Classics,

    an imprint of Read & Co. 

    This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

    way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available

    from the British Library.

    Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

    For more information visit

    www.readandcobooks.co.uk

    Contents

    M. R. James

    A SCHOOL STORY

    THE ROSE GARDEN

    THE TRACTATE MIDDOTH

    CASTING THE RUNES

    THE STALLS OF BARCHESTER CATHEDRAL

    MARTIN’S CLOSE

    MR HUMPHREYS AND HIS INHERITANCE

    M. R. James

    Montague Rhodes James was born in Kent, England in 1862. An intellectually gifted child, he excelled academically at both Temple Grove School and Eton College before enrolling at King’s College, Cambridge. A highly respected scholar to this day, James’ areas of research interest were apocryphal Biblical literature and mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. He was, by turns, Fellow, Dean, and Tutor at King’s College, and in 1905 was installed as Provost. James was a highly sociable man, and he travelled widely throughout Europe.

    James came to writing fiction relatively late, not publishing his first collection of short stories – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) – until the age of 42. Many of his tales were written as Christmas Eve entertainments and read aloud to friends. James described his introduction to ghosts in 1931: In my childhood I chanced to see a toy Punch and Judy set, with figures cut out in cardboard. One of these was The Ghost. It was a tall figure habited in white with an unnaturally long and narrow head, also surrounded with white, and a dismal visage. Upon this my conceptions of a ghost were based, and for years it permeated my dreams. James believed that must a good story must put the reader into the position of saying to himself: ‘If I’m not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!’ He eventually published five collections of his ghost stories, all of which were reprinted and adapted numerous times.

    Modern scholars now see James as having redefined the ghost story for the 20th century by abandoning many of the formal Gothic clichés of his predecessors and using more realistic contemporary settings. However, James’s tales tend to reflect his own antiquarian interests, and he is seen as the founder of the ‘antiquarian ghost story’. His first two collections – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories (1911) – are generally regarded as his most important, containing as they do the well-known stories ‘Number 13’, ‘Count Magnus’, ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ and ‘Casting the Runes’.

    The onset of World War One marked the beginning of the end of James’ golden years in Cambridge. In 1918, he accepted the post of Provost of Eton College. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1930, and died in 1936, aged 73.

    MORE

    GHOST STORIES

    OF AN ANTIQUARY

    A Collection of Ghostly Tales

    A SCHOOL STORY

    Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. ‘At our school,’ said A., ‘we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase. What was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?’

    ‘You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own. There’s a subject for you, by the way—’The Folklore of Private Schools’.’

    ‘Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.’

    ‘Nowadays the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.’

    ‘No doubt: they weren’t born or thought of in my time. Let’s see. I wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, ‘I’ve seen it,’ and died.’

    ‘Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?’

    ‘I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me think—Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice among the bed-curtains say, ‘Now we’re shut in for the night.’ None of those had any explanation or sequel. I wonder if they go on still, those stories.’

    ‘Oh, likely enough—with additions from the magazines, as I said. You never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not; nobody has that ever I came across.’

    ‘From the way in which you said that, I gather that you have.’

    ‘I really don’t know; but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven’t any explanation of it.

    ‘The school I mean was near London. It was established in a large and fairly old house—a great white building with very fine grounds about it; there were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the older gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields which we used for our games. I think probably it was quite an attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess any tolerable features.

    ‘I came to the school in a September, soon after the year 1870; and among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to: a Highland boy, whom I will call McLeod. I needn’t spend time in describing him: the main thing is that I got to know him very well. He was not an exceptional boy in any way—not particularly good at books or games—but he suited me.

    ‘The school was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130 boys there as a rule, and so a considerable staff of masters was required, and there were rather frequent changes among them.

    ‘One term—perhaps it was my third or fourth—a new master made his appearance. His name was Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale, black-bearded man. I think we liked him: he had travelled a good deal, and had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was some competition among us to get within earshot of him. I remember too—dear me, I have hardly thought of it since then!—that he had a charm on his watch-chain that attracted my attention one day, and he let me examine it. It was, I now suppose, a gold Byzantine coin; there was an effigy of some absurd emperor on one side; the other side had been worn practically smooth, and he had had cut on it—rather barbarously—his own initials, G.W.S., and a date, 24 July, 1865. Yes, I can see it now: he told me he had picked it up in Constantinople: it was about the size of a florin, perhaps rather smaller. ‘Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing Latin grammar with us. One of his favourite methods—perhaps it is rather a good one—was to make us construct sentences out of our own heads to illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn. Of course that is a thing which gives a silly boy a chance of being impertinent: there are lots of school stories in which that happens—or anyhow there might be. But Sampson was too good a disciplinarian for us to think of trying that on with him. Now, on this occasion he was telling us how to express remembering in Latin: and he ordered us each to make a sentence bringing in the verb memini, ‘I remember.’ Well, most of us made up some ordinary sentence such as ‘I remember my father,’ or ‘He remembers his book,’ or something equally uninteresting: and I dare say a good many put down memino librum meum, and so forth: but the boy I mentioned—McLeod—was evidently thinking of something more elaborate than that. The rest of us wanted to have our sentences passed, and get on to something else, so some kicked him under the desk, and I, who was next to him, poked him and whispered to him to look sharp. But he didn’t seem to attend. I looked at his paper and saw he had put down nothing at all. So I jogged him again harder than before and upbraided him sharply for keeping us all waiting. That did have some effect. He started and seemed to wake up, and then very quickly he scribbled about a couple of lines on his paper, and showed it up with the rest. As it was the last, or nearly the last, to come in, and as Sampson had a good deal to say to the boys who had written meminiscimus patri meo and the rest of it, it turned out that the clock struck twelve before he had got to McLeod, and McLeod had to wait afterwards to have his sentence corrected. There was nothing much going on outside when I got out, so I waited for him to come. He came very slowly when he did arrive, and I guessed there had been some sort of trouble.

    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you get?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said McLeod, ‘nothing much: but I think Sampson’s rather sick with me.’ ‘Why, did you show him up some rot?’ ‘No fear,’ he said. ‘It was all right as far as I could see: it was like this: Memento—that’s right enough for remember, and it takes a genitive,—memento putei inter quatuor taxos.’ ‘What silly rot!’ I said. ‘What made you shove that down? What does it mean?’ ‘That’s the funny part,’ said McLeod. ‘I’m not quite sure what it does mean. All I know is, it just came into my head and I corked it down. I know what I think it means, because just before I wrote it down I had a sort of picture of it in my head: I believe it means ‘Remember the well among the four’—what are those dark sort of trees that have red berries on them?’ ‘Mountain ashes, I s’pose you mean.’ ‘I never heard of them,’ said McLeod; ‘no, I’ll tell you—yews.’ ‘Well, and what did Sampson say?’ ‘Why, he was jolly odd about it. When he read it he got up and went to the mantelpiece and stopped quite a long time without saying anything, with his back to me. And then he said, without turning round, and rather quiet, ‘What do you suppose that means?’ I told him what I thought; only I couldn’t remember the name of the silly tree: and then he wanted to know why I put it down, and I had to say something or other. And after that he left off talking about it, and asked me how long I’d been here, and where my people lived, and things like that: and then I came away: but he wasn’t looking a bit well.’

    ‘I don’t remember any more that was said by either of us about this. Next day McLeod took to his bed with a chill or something of the kind, and it was a week or more before he was in school again. And as much as a month went by without anything happening that was noticeable. Whether or not Mr. Sampson was really startled, as McLeod had thought, he didn’t show it. I am pretty sure, of course, now, that there was something very curious in his past history, but I’m not going to pretend that we boys were sharp enough to guess any such thing.

    ‘There was one other incident of the same kind as the last which I told you. Several times since that day we had had to make up examples in school to illustrate different rules, but there had never been any row except when we did them wrong. At last there came a day when we were going through those dismal things which people call Conditional Sentences, and we were told to make a conditional sentence, expressing a future consequence. We did it, right or wrong, and showed up our bits of paper, and Sampson began looking through them. All at once he got up, made some odd sort of noise in his throat, and rushed out by a door that was just by his desk. We sat there for a minute or two, and then—I suppose it was incorrect—but we went up, I and one or two others, to look at the papers on his desk. Of course I thought someone must have put down some nonsense or other, and Sampson had gone off to report him. All the same, I noticed that he hadn’t taken any of the papers with him when he ran out. Well, the top paper on the desk was written in red ink—which no one used—and it wasn’t in anyone’s hand who was in the class. They all looked at it—McLeod and all—and took their dying oaths that it wasn’t theirs. Then I thought of counting the bits of paper. And of this I made quite certain: that there were seventeen bits of paper on the desk, and sixteen boys in the form. Well, I bagged the extra

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