“Do you believe in ghosts?” said Mr. Saxon.
“Well, I do to a certain extent,” said Mr. Wilkins; “but I’ve never seen one.”
“You’ve never had a conversation with a dead man?”
“Lor’, no,” said Mr. Wilkins, “nor nobody else, I should think.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Saxon, “I have.”
We were all silent directly, and I began to feel creepy, and as if somebody was breathing on the back of my neck, which is a feeling I always have when people begin to tell ghost stories.
“I’ll tell you about it,” said Mr. Saxon; and then he began. Of course I can’t tell it in his own words, because I had to write it down from memory afterwards, but this is something like it.
“When I was a young fellow,” said Mr. Saxon, “and a clerk in my father’s office in the City, I used to knock about a good deal of an evening and see life, and as my father and mother wouldn’t let me have a latchkey, and didn’t like me coming in at all hours, I left home, and went to live by myself in lodgings in a street running off the Camden-road. There were a lot of other young fellows living in the house—all of them lads studying for veterinary surgeons at the Royal Veterinary College in Great College-street. Lots of the houses in this neighbourhood were filled with these young fellows, as many of them came up from the country for the ‘term,’ and, of course, wanted to live near the College.
“One of the nicest of them, and my particular friend, was Charley Ransom. He was a good-looking lad about eighteen, but very reckless, and a good deal fonder of billiard-rooms, and betting, and music-halls, than he was of work. He’d been up for an examination and failed, and he told me that his old dad down in the country was very wild with him, and that if he didn’t pass this term he would have to go back home and go into an office as a clerk.
“He made up his mind to try, but he was in with a bad set, and they got him out of an evening when he ought to be studying, and unfortunately he was a fellow that a very little drink made excited, and then he lost his head, and no freak was too mad for him.