of the house.] At last I got into bed, and I may say I hardly slept a wink the whole night.  I simply lay in terror, of what I cannot say, but I had the feeling of some very disagreeable sensation in the air, but we did not hear a sound all night from the time we got into bed until we got up next morning at 8.30.

“I spent the whole of the morning in the drawing-room writing letters and reading, and from time to time I went up to No. 1 to get books and different things, and each time was a little surprised to find the room empty, as there had been a ceaseless noise of housemaids, and very noisy ones too.  I also heard what I had described before as the cannon.  After luncheon Miss Freer and Miss Langton and I went out walking, and just as we were coming in to tea we all three heard the cannon, and then I said that is the noise I heard every morning, and sometimes in the evening, in the drawing-room.”

This afternoon we were having tea in the drawing-room at 4.30, Mrs. M——­, Miss Langton, and myself.  We heard some one walking overhead in No. 1, a sound we have heard often before, when we knew the room to be empty above.  Mrs. M——­ remarked that it was just the sound she had heard, again and again, when sitting alone in the drawing-room.

It was so exactly the heavy, heelless steps we had heard before, that Miss L——­ ran upstairs softly to see if any one was there, but found no one about.  Next we heard a loud bang—­not of a door—­in the hall, and she went out again to ascertain the cause, and met the butler on the same errand.  We could find nothing to account for it.  It was like the noise before described, of something dropped heavily into the hall from the gallery above.

There had been so much trouble of ascertaining whether the noises were caused by doors banging, that since the warmer weather set in, ever since our return on March 20th, in fact, we have had every passage-door opening into the hall and into the gallery upstairs fixed open with wedges.

We had scarcely settled to our tea again before we again heard the footsteps overhead, and again Miss Langton went up and found the room empty.  She walked across the room, and we heard her do so, but the sound was quite different.  She did it noisily on purpose, but though she is very big and tall, she didn’t sound heavy enough.

Mrs. M——­ remarks, on hearing this read over, that the sound was different in character as well as in volume—­that the footsteps she (and we) heard were “between a run and a walk.”  My phrase was, and has always been, “as of the quick, heavy steps of a person whose foot-gear didn’t match.”  We called it, when we first heard it in No. 8, a “shuffling step.”

After she came down the servants’ tea-bell rang, and we at once said, “Now we shall know where they all are.”  The hall is under the wing, at the other end of the house,