distracted with the news, had thrown himself down at the door and called upon her to let him in.  The old man could scarcely speak of it for tears.  To me it seemed as if—­Heaven help us, how little do we know about anything!—­a scene like that might impress itself somehow upon the hidden heart of nature.  I do not pretend to know how, but the repetition had struck me at the time as, in its terrible strangeness and incomprehensibility, almost mechanical,—­as if the unseen actor could not exceed or vary, but was bound to re-enact the whole.  One thing that struck me, however, greatly, was the likeness between the old minister and my boy in the manner of regarding these strange phenomena.  Dr. Moncrieff was not terrified, as I had been myself, and all the rest of us.  It was no “ghost,” as I fear we all vulgarly considered it, to him,—­but a poor creature whom he knew under these conditions, just as he had known him in the flesh, having no doubt of his identity.  And to Roland it was the same.  This spirit in pain,—­if it was a spirit,—­this voice out of the unseen,—­was a poor fellow-creature in misery, to be succored and helped out of his trouble, to my boy.  He spoke to me quite frankly about it when he got better.  “I knew father would find out some way,” he said.  And this was when he was strong and well, and all idea that he would turn hysterical or become a seer of visions had happily passed away.

* * * * *

I must add one curious fact, which does not seem to me to have any relation to the above, but which Simson made great use of, as the human agency which he was determined to find somehow.  We had examined the ruins very closely at the time of these occurrences; but afterwards, when all was over, as we went casually about them one Sunday afternoon in the idleness of that unemployed day, Simson with his stick penetrated an old window which had been entirely blocked up with fallen soil.  He jumped down into it in great excitement, and called me to follow.  There we found a little hole,—­for it was more a hole than a room,—­entirely hidden under the ivy and ruins, in which there was a quantity of straw laid in a corner, as if some one had made a bed there, and some remains of crusts about the floor.  Some one had lodged there, and not very long before, he made out; and that this unknown being was the author of all the mysterious sounds we heard he is convinced.  “I told you it was human agency,” he said triumphantly.  He forgets, I suppose, how he and I stood with our lights, seeing nothing, while the space between us was audibly traversed by something that could speak, and sob, and suffer.  There is no argument with men of this kind.  He is ready to get up a laugh against me on this slender ground.  “I was puzzled myself,—­I could not make it out,—­but I always felt convinced human agency was at the bottom of it.  And here it is,—­and a clever fellow he must have been,” the Doctor says.