The clock of the cathedral had sounded midnight. The officers went their rounds, and I from my station was looking down on the port and out over the Mediterranean, scarcely stirring beneath the stars. The clock sounded one. All was quiet. Two o’clock struck. Suddenly I heard fierce voices of challenge given in Spanish. I was on the alert, but could see nothing. The voices appeared to be in the air, and to come close to the ramparts. I shook myself to see if I were wide awake, but the voices continued. Then I heard the sentries challenging “Qui vive?” one after another. I too challenged. A musket shot rang through the night. The cry to arms was raised, and the ramparts were quickly crowded with officers and men. In the east the day was breaking. Its full light was soon on the ramparts. Men looked curiously at each other. The sentries questioned, all repeated the same story. They heard the voices, as they thought, of Spanish soldiers, and had replied by challenging.
Who fired the shot?
There was not much need to ask. Ryan was lying dead close to one of the batteries. His musket, which had been exploded, lay beside him. Even in death his face wore the scared look of a man who had seen a dreadful vision. I shuddered as I looked at him, and thought of the threat of the Capuchin of the “invisible and supernatural hand.” I kept my own counsel. I myself never heard anything after that night, but others did, or thought so, and this fact is attested by Captain Drake, of Drakerath, in the county of Meath, who was of our regiment, and one of the coolest and bravest officers of the brigade, and who has set forth in his memoirs that he, while on night duty on the ramparts, thought he saw and heard the Spectre of Barcelona.
THE BLACK DOG.
“Did you ever see a ghost, Tim?”
“No, then; I don’t mane to say I ever see a ghost, nor I don’t mane to say that I didn’t nayther; but maybe I see more than any of ye ever saw in your born days,” said old Tim Kerrigan, as he stooped over the hearth, and, picking up a sod of turf, put the fire to his dhudeen.
His listeners were a group of light-hearted youngsters (of whom I was one), who turned in to old Tim’s one Christmas Eve a good many years ago, and who, seated round the fire, were trying to coax him to tell them some of his supernatural experiences, which, if Tim were to be relied on, were as numerous as they were varied. Tim, at the time, was an old man of about five-and-seventy, still hardy and supple; but his brown face—“brown as the ribbed sea-sand”—was full of wrinkles. Over these wrinkles he appeared to us, youngsters, to have wonderful power. He had a trick of pursing, and withdrawing, and inflating his lips before answering any question put to him, with the result that the wrinkles appeared to close in and to open out after the manner of the bellows of a concertina, and when, at the same time, he contracted his forehead, and brought his shaggy, grey eyebrows down over his bright, little, brown eyes, they peered out from under them in such a way as to bear a curious resemblance to those of a rabbit peeping out under the edge of his burrow.