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Updated: June 3, 2025
In opening this volume on Animals and their associations with the unknown, I will commence with a case of hauntings in the Old Manor House, at Oxenby. My informant was a Mrs. Hartnoll, whom I can see in my mind's eye, as distinctly as if I were looking at her now.
And if human murderers and their victims have phantasms, why should not animals have phantasms too? Why should not the phenomenon of the cat seen by Mrs. Hartnoll and the Wheelers have been the actual phantasm of an earthbound cat? No amount of reasoning religious or otherwise has as yet annihilated the possibility of all forms of earthly life possessing spirits.
"My head don't seem able to follow you very clearly, but if we make our first haul together, the matter remains where it is." "Very well," I yielded. "Then I must get ahead of you, to get quits." "You won't, though," said Hartnoll, pushing back his chair, and so dismissing the subject. I rang for the waiter again, and took counsel with him.
Whereupon he thanked me, begged my pardon for having taken the liberty, and immediately took another, telling me that anyone having his experience of young gentlemen could see with half an eye that I was born to command. "Tell you what," said I to Hartnoll when the waiter had left us, "that fellow has given me a notion, with his talk about prize-money.
Curiously enough, and as if in instant sympathy with my dejection, the cymbals ceased to clash. The showmen began to extinguish their torches. I had lost my watch; Hartnoll did not own one. But we agreed that, at latest, the hour could not be much more than ten. Yet the shows were closing, the populace was melting away into the fog. "I've had enough of this.
"My dirk!" pleaded Hartnoll. "I was getting it away, but one of 'em half-broke my arm and I dropped it again in the passage." "Hey? Stolen your dirk have they? That's excuse enough. . . . Right you are, men, and in you go!" He waved his cocked hat to them as a huntsman lays on his hounds.
"A man might say that you've made a pretty fair beginning," he ventured; but I had warned Hartnoll to keep his chin up, and we passed in with a fine show of haughty indifference.
Then followed a strangling sob and the thud of heavy blows "Rodd, I can't stand this," whispered Hartnoll. I answered, "Nor I;" and together we made a spring for it and hurled into the passage, bearing back the woman who tried to hold the door against us. At the rush of our footsteps the virago dropped Meliar-Ann and fled down the passage towards a doorway, through which she burst, screaming.
But these were followed by a performing pony, which, after some tricks, being invited by his master to indicate among the audience a gentleman addicted to kissing the ladies and running away, thrust its muzzle affectionately into my waistcoat; whereat Hartnoll recovered his spirits at a bound, and treacherously laughed louder than any of the audience.
No boat came off for us. The waiter, however, advised us not to trouble ourselves. He would make it all right in the morning. So Hartnoll and I supped together in the empty coffee-room; compared notes; drank a pint of port apiece; and under its influence became boastful. Insensibly the adventure of the beaver hat came to wear the aspect of a dashing practical joke.
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