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No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black. There were three rooms, besides my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. Through the three high, narrow windows one looked out over red roofs gleaming with the wet, grey gables and court-yards. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. I did not. So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door. I had found my ghost and would have given worlds to have escaped from that dâk-bungalow. On our return, he said: "Oh, you've been on the 'Shilling Emetic,' have you? You'll come to six-pennorth on the 'Liver Jerker' next." I presume he meant a tricycle, but I affected not to understand him.

I expressed my opinion that such performances were unworthy of respectable patronage; but he replied: "Oh, it was only 'for one night only.' I had a fit of the blues come on, and thought I would go to see Polly Presswell, England's Particular Spark." I told him I was proud to say I had never heard of her. He said he had got leave from the bank, and as Monday was a holiday he thought he would give us a little surprise. I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome. I argued the matter out at great length with myself; and the more I argued the less probable it seemed that one bed, one table, and two chairs-all the furniture of the room next to mine-could so exactly duplicate the sounds of a game of billiards. It turned out to be a collection of poems. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dâk-bungalows, that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.

Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives in India acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. It is not to be wondered at that in the midst of these festivities such trivialities as Lorimer's poem found no place in his thoughts. Do you know what Fear is? I suppose the officers I associate with know about my father, or I suspect they do, and every allusion to a unicorn cuts into me as if the beast itself were driving its horn between my ribs. The third shift was to Calcutta, and there the Sahib died while driving a dog-cart. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib's service not a butler in the Province could touch him. He had served a Sahib once. Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see-fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat-fear that makes you sweat in the palms of the hands, arid gulp in order to keep the uvula at work?

My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker. But the ridiculous exhibition of temper and sulkiness that a great many players show habitually, only begins to be humorous when the game is over and the opponent of the irascible one is telling a congenial friend after dinner about it, and the offender is not present. There was a whirr and a click, and both sounds could only have been made by one thing-a billiard-ball. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly mistake-the whirr of a billiard-ball down the length of the slates when the striker is stringing for break. On short voyages it makes no such exposure of itself; it hasn't time to slump down to this sorrowful level. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls. "But look here, Buddenbrook," Gratjens broke in, leaning far over the table and shifting his cue in his bony hand as he took careful aim, what is billiards "I don’t get the idea.