reins up in both hands, turned his face, which had hitherto been looking away from me, towards me, and looked down upon me.  The group was still as in a tableau, with the bright moon shining upon it, and I at once recognized the rider as Lieutenant B., whom I had formerly known.  The face, however, was different from what it used to be; in the place of being clean-shaven, as when I used to know it, it was now surrounded by a fringe (what used to be known as a Newgate fringe), and it was the face of a dead man, the ghastly waxen pallor of it brought out more distinctly in the moonlight by the dark fringe of hair by which it was encircled; the body, too, was much stouter than when I had known it in life.

“I marked this in a moment; and then resolved to lay hold of the thing, whatever it might be.  I dashed up the bank, and the earth which had been thrown on the side giving under my feet, I fell forward up the bank on my hands, recovering myself instantly.  I gained the road, and stood in the exact spot where the group had been, but which was now vacant, there was not the trace of anything; it was impossible for them to go on, the road stopped at a precipice about twenty yards further on, and it was impossible to turn and go back in a second.  All this flashed through my mind, and I then ran along the road for about 100 yards, along which they had come, until I had to stop for want of breath, but there was no trace of anything, and not a sound to be heard.  I then returned home, where I found my dogs, who, on all other occasions my most faithful companions, had not come with me along the road.

“Next morning I went up to D., who belonged to the same regiment as B., and gradually induced him to talk of him.  I said, ’How very stout he had become lately, and what possessed him to allow his beard to grow with that horrid fringe?’ D. replied, ’Yes, he became very bloated before his death.  You know he led a very fast life, and while on the sick list he allowed the fringe to grow, in spite of all that we could say to him, and I believe he was buried with it.’  I asked him where he got the pony I had seen, describing it minutely.  ‘Why,’ said D., ’how do you know anything about all this?  You hadn’t seen B. for two or three years, and the pony you never saw.  He bought him at Peshawur, and killed him one day riding in his reckless fashion down the hill to Trete.’  I then told him what I had seen the night before.

“Once, when the galloping sound was very distinct, I rushed to the door of my house.  There I found my Hindoo bearer, standing with a tattie in his hand.  I asked him what he was there for.  He said that there came a sound of riding down the hill, and ‘passed him like a typhoon,’ and went round the corner of the house, and he was determined to waylay it, whatever it was.”

In commenting on the case, Mr. Stead remarks, “That such a story as this, gravely told by a British General in the present day, helps us to understand how our ancestors came to believe in the wonderful story of Herne the Hunter.”  I do not know about Herne the Hunter, but it is at all events good testimony that horses as well as men have spirits, for one of the ghosts the General saw was, undoubtedly, that of the pony murdered by B. Why it was still ridden by the phantom of its former master is another question.