“Rats in the wainscot,” chimed in Lester.  “As you like,” said Barnes coloring.

“Suppose we all go,” said Meagle.  “Start after supper, and get there about eleven.  We have been walking for ten days now without an adventure—­except Barnes’s discovery that ditchwater smells longest.  It will be a novelty, at any rate, and, if we break the spell by all surviving, the grateful owner ought to come down handsome.”

“Let’s see what the landlord has to say about it first,” said Lester.  “There is no fun in passing a night in an ordinary empty house.  Let us make sure that it is haunted.”

He rang the bell, and, sending for the landlord, appealed to him in the name of our common humanity not to let them waste a night watching in a house in which spectres and hobgoblins had no part.  The reply was more than reassuring, and the landlord, after describing with considerable art the exact appearance of a head which had been seen hanging out of a window in the moonlight, wound up with a polite but urgent request that they would settle his bill before they went.

“It’s all very well for you young gentlemen to have your fun,” he said indulgently; “but supposing as how you are all found dead in the morning, what about me?  It ain’t called the Toll-House for nothing, you know.”

“Who died there last?” inquired Barnes, with an air of polite derision.

“A tramp,” was the reply.  “He went there for the sake of half a crown, and they found him next morning hanging from the balusters, dead.”

“Suicide,” said Barnes.  “Unsound mind.”

The landlord nodded.  “That’s what the jury brought it in,” he said slowly; “but his mind was sound enough when he went in there.  I’d known him, off and on, for years.  I’m a poor man, but I wouldn’t spend the night in that house for a hundred pounds.”

[Illustration:  “I’m a poor man, but I wouldn’t spend the night in that house for a hundred pounds.”]

He repeated this remark as they started on their expedition a few hours later.  They left as the inn was closing for the night; bolts shot noisily behind them, and, as the regular customers trudged slowly homewards, they set off at a brisk pace in the direction of the house.  Most of the cottages were already in darkness, and lights in others went out as they passed.

“It seems rather hard that we have got to lose a night’s rest in order to convince Barnes of the existence of ghosts,” said White.

“It’s in a good cause,” said Meagle.  “A most worthy object; and something seems to tell me that we shall succeed.  You didn’t forget the candles, Lester?”

“I have brought two,” was the reply; “all the old man could spare.”

There was but little moon, and the night was cloudy.  The road between high hedges was dark, and in one place, where it ran through a wood, so black that they twice stumbled in the uneven ground at the side of it.