“Oh yes,” said Gypsy, “I always do.”
“Did you bring up the oars?” asked Tom, at supper.
“Yes, they’re in the barn. I do sometimes remember things, Mr. Tom.”
“Did you——,” began Tom, again.
But Winnie just then upset the entire contents of his silver mug of milk exactly into Tom’s lap, and as this was the fourth time the young gentleman had done that very thing, within three days, Tom’s sentence was broken off for another of a more agitated nature.
That night Tom had a dream.
He thought the house was a haunted castle—(he had, I am sorry to say, been reading novels in study hours), and that the ghost of old Baron Somebody who had defrauded the beautiful Lady Somebody-else, of Kleiner Berg Basin and the Dipper, in which it was supposed Mrs. Surly had secreted a blind kitten, which it was somehow or other imperatively necessary should be drowned, for the well-being of the beautiful and unfortunate heiress,—that the ghost of this atrocious Baron was going down stairs, with white silk stockings on his feet and a tin pan on his head.
At this crisis Tom awoke, with a jump, and heard, or thought he heard, a slight creaking noise in the entry. Winnie’s cat, of course; or the wind rattling the blinds;—nevertheless, Tom went to his door, and looked out. He was exceedingly sleepy, and the entry was exceedingly dark, and, though he had not a breath of faith in ghosts, not he,—was there ever a boy who had?—and though he considered such persons, as had, as candidates for the State Idiot Asylum, yet it must be confessed that even Tom was possessed of an imagination, and this imagination certainly, for an instant, deluded him into the belief that a dim figure was flitting down stairs.
“Who’s there?” said Tom, rather faintly.
There was no reply. A curious sound, like the lifting of a distant latch by phantom fingers, fell upon his ear,—then all was still.