We had a few night alarms in the beginning.  On the first night, I was knocked up by Jack with a most wonderful ship’s lantern in his hand, like the gills of some monster of the deep, who informed me that he “was going aloft to the main truck,” to have the weathercock down.  It was a stormy night and I remonstrated; but Jack called my attention to its making a sound like a cry of despair, and said somebody would be “hailing a ghost” presently, if it wasn’t done.  So, up to the top of the house, where I could hardly stand for the wind, we went, accompanied by Mr. Beaver; and there Jack, lantern and all, with Mr. Beaver after him, swarmed up to the top of a cupola, some two dozen feet above the chimneys, and stood upon nothing particular, coolly knocking the weathercock off, until they both got into such good spirits with the wind and the height, that I thought they would never come down.  Another night, they turned out again, and had a chimney-cowl off.  Another night, they cut a sobbing and gulping water-pipe away.  Another night, they found out something else.  On several occasions, they both, in the coolest manner, simultaneously dropped out of their respective bedroom windows, hand over hand by their counterpanes, to “overhaul” something mysterious in the garden.

The engagement among us was faithfully kept, and nobody revealed anything.  All we knew was, if any one’s room were haunted, no one looked the worse for it.

The foregoing story is particularly interesting as illustrating the leaning of Dickens’s mind toward the spiritualistic and mystical fancies current in his time, and the counterbalance of his common sense and fun.

“He probably never made up his own mind,” Mr. Andrew Lang declares in a discussion of this Haunted House story.  Mr. Lang says he once took part in a similar quest, and “can recognize the accuracy of most of Dickens’s remarks.  Indeed, even to persons not on the level of the Odd Girl in education, the temptation to produce ‘phenomena’ for fun is all but overwhelming.  That people communicate hallucinations to each other ’in some diseased way without words,’ is a modern theory perhaps first formulated here by Dickens.”

“The Signal Man’s Story,” which follows, is likewise, Mr. Lang believes, “probably based on some real story of the kind, some anecdote of premonitions.  There are scores in the records of the Society for Psychical Research.”—­The Editor.

NO. 1 BRANCH LINE:  THE SIGNAL-MAN

“Halloa!  Below there!”

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole.  One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line.  There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what.  But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.