“Well, I got a wire asking for an appointment, which of course told me that there was some trouble.  On the date I fixed old Captain Hisgins himself came up to see me.  He told me a great many new details about the horse story; though naturally I had always known the main points and understood that if the first child were a girl, that girl would be haunted by the Horse during her courtship.

“It is, as you can see already, an extraordinary story and though I have always known about it, I have never thought it to be anything more than an old-time legend, as I have already hinted.  You see, for seven generations the Hisgins family have had men children for their first-born and even the Hisginses themselves have long considered the tale to be little more than a myth.

“To come to the present, the eldest child of the reigning family is a girl and she has been often teased and warned in jest by her friends and relations that she is the first girl to be the eldest for seven generations and that she would have to keep her men friends at arm’s length or go into a nunnery if she hoped to escape the haunting.  And this, I think, shows us how thoroughly the tale had grown to be considered as nothing worthy of the least serious thought.  Don’t you think so?

“Two months ago Miss Hisgins became engaged to Beaumont, a young Naval Officer, and on the evening of the very day of the engagement, before it was even formally announced, a most extraordinary thing happened which resulted in Captain Hisgins making the appointment and my ultimately going down to their place to look into the thing.

“From the old family records and papers that were entrusted to me I found that there could be no possible doubt that prior to something like a hundred and fifty years ago there were some very extraordinary and disagreeable coincidences, to put the thing in the least emotional way.  In the whole of the two centuries prior to that date there were five first-born girls out of a total of seven generations of the family.  Each of these girls grew up to maidenhood and each became engaged, and each one died during the period of engagement, two by suicide, one by falling from a window, one from a ‘broken heart’ (presumably heart failure, owing to sudden shock through fright).  The fifth girl was killed one evening in the park ’round the house; but just how, there seemed to be no exact knowledge; only that there was an impression that she had been kicked by a horse.  She was dead when found.  Now, you see, all of these deaths might be attributed in a way—­even the suicides—­to natural causes, I mean as distinct from supernatural.  You see?  Yet, in every case the maidens had undoubtedly suffered some extraordinary and terrifying experiences during their various courtships for in all of the records there was mention either of the neighing of an unseen horse or of the sounds of an invisible horse galloping, as well as many other peculiar and quite inexplicable manifestations.  You begin to understand now, I think, just how extraordinary a business it was that I was asked to look into.