"Oh, were there any more then?" I inquired.
He smiled, and gave a little cough. He said he did not like to
appear to be boasting, but that, counting trombones, there were
seven.
"Dear me!" I replied, "you must have had quite a busy time of it,
one way and another."
He said that perhaps he ought not to be the one to say so, but that
really, speaking of ordinary middle-society, he thought there were
few ghosts who could look back upon a life of more sustained
usefulness.
He puffed away in silence for a few seconds, while I sat watching
him. I had never seen a ghost smoking a pipe before, that I could
remember, and it interested me.
I asked him what tobacco he used, and he replied, "The ghost of cut
cavendish, as a rule."
He explained that the ghost of all the tobacco that a man smoked in
life belonged to him when he became dead. He said he himself had
smoked a good deal of cut cavendish when he was alive, so that he
was well supplied with the ghost of it now.
I observed that it was a useful thing to know that, and I made up
my mind to smoke as much tobacco as ever I could before I died.
I thought I might as well start at once, so I said I would join him
in a pipe, and he said, "Do, old man"; and I reached over and got
out the necessary paraphernalia from my coat pocket and lit up.
We grew quite chummy after that, and he told me all his crimes. He
said he had lived next door once to a young lady who was learning
to play the guitar, while a gentleman who practised on the bass-
viol lived opposite. And he, with fiendish cunning, had introduced
these two unsuspecting young people to one another, and had
persuaded them to elope with each other against their parents'
wishes, and take their musical instruments with them; and they had
done so, and, before the honeymoon was over, SHE had broken his
head with the bass-viol, and HE had tried to cram the guitar down
her throat, and had injured her for life.
My friend said he used to lure muffin-men into the passage and then
stuff them with their own wares till they burst and died. He said
he had quieted eighteen that way.
Young men and women who recited long and dreary poems at evening
parties, and callow youths who walked about the streets late at
night, playing concertinas, he used to get together and poison in
batches of ten, so as to save expense; and park orators and
temperance lecturers he used to shut up six in a small room with a
glass of water and a collection-box apiece, and let them talk each
other to death.
It did one good to listen to him.
I asked him when he expected the other ghosts--the ghosts of the
wait and the cornet-player, and the German band that Uncle John had
mentioned. He smiled, and said they would never come again, any of
them.
I said, "Why; isn't it true, then, that they meet you here every
Christmas Eve for a row?"
He replied that it WAS true. Every Christmas Eve, for twenty-five
years, had he and they fought in that room; but they would never
trouble him nor anybody else again. One by one, had he laid them
out, spoilt, and utterly useless for all haunting purposes. He had
finished off the last German-band ghost that very evening, just
before I came upstairs, and had thrown what was left of it out
through the slit between the window-sashes. He said it would never
be worth calling a ghost again.
"I suppose you will still come yourself, as usual?" I said. "They
would be sorry to miss you, I know."
"Oh, I don't know," he replied; "there's nothing much to come for
now. Unless," he added kindly, "YOU are going to be here. I'll
come if you will sleep here next Christmas Eve."
"I have taken a liking to you," he continued; "you don't fly off,
screeching, when you see a party, and your hair doesn't stand on
end. You've no idea," he said, "how sick I am of seeing people's
hair standing on end."
He said it irritated him.
Just then a slight noise reached us from the yard below, and he
started and turned deathly black.
"You are ill," I cried, springing towards him; "tell me the best
thing to do for you. Shall I drink some brandy, and give you the
ghost of it?"
He remained silent, listening intently for a moment, and then he
gave a sigh of relief, and the shade came back to his cheek.
"It's all right," he murmured; "I was afraid it was the cock."
"Oh, it's too early for that," I said. "Why, it's only the middle
of the night."
"Oh, that doesn't make any difference to those cursed chickens," he
replied bitterly. "They would just as soon crow in the middle of
the night as at any other time--sooner, if they thought it would
spoil a chap's evening out. I believe they do it on purpose."
He said a friend of his, the ghost of a man who had killed a water-
rate collector, used to haunt a house in Long Acre, where they kept
fowls in the cellar, and every time a policeman went by and flashed
his bull's-eye down the grating, the old cock there would fancy it
was the sun, and start crowing like mad; when, of course, the poor
ghost had to dissolve, and it would, in consequence, get back home
sometimes as early as one o'clock in the morning, swearing
fearfully because it had only been out for an hour.