“Haunted?”

“Yes, haunted.  Good day.”

He was gone again.  I ran out of the room, and shouted after him down the stairs.  He was already at the bottom of the flight.

“Tress!  Come back!  What do you mean by talking such nonsense?”

“Of course it’s only nonsense.  We know that that sort of thing always is nonsense.  But if you should have reason to suppose that there is something in it besides nonsense, you may think it worth your while to make inquiries of me.  But I won’t have that pipe back again in my possession on any terms—­mind that!”

The bang of the front door told me that he had gone out into the street.  I let him go.  I laughed to myself as I reentered the room.  Haunted!  That was not a bad idea of his.  I saw the whole position at a glance.  The truth of the matter was that he did regret his generosity, and he was ready to go any lengths if he could only succeed in cajoling me into restoring his gift.  He was aware that I have views upon certain matters which are not wholly in accordance with those which are popularly supposed to be the views of the day, and particularly that on the question of what are commonly called supernatural visitations I have a standpoint of my own.  Therefore, it was not a bad move on his part to try to make me believe that about the pipe on which he knew I had set my heart there was something which could not be accounted for by ordinary laws.  Yet, as his own sense would have told him it would do, if he had only allowed himself to reflect for a moment, the move failed.  Because I am not yet so far gone as to suppose that a pipe, a thing of meerschaum and of amber, in the sense in which I understand the word, could be haunted—­a pipe, a mere pipe.

“Hollo!  I thought the creature’s legs were twined right round the bowl!”

I was holding the pipe in my hand, regarding it with the affectionate eyes with which a connoisseur does regard a curio, when I was induced to make this exclamation.  I was certainly under the impression that, when I first took the pipe out of the box, two, if not three of the feelers had been twined about the bowl—­twined tightly, so that you could not see daylight between them and it.  Now they were almost entirely detached, only the tips touching the meerschaum, and those particular feelers were gathered up as though the creature were in the act of taking a spring.  Of course I was under a misapprehension:  the feelers couldn’t have been twined; a moment before I should have been ready to bet a thousand to one that they were.  Still, one does make mistakes, and very egregious mistakes, at times.  At the same time, I confess that when I saw that dreadful-looking animal poised on the extreme edge of the bowl, for all the world as though it were just going to spring at me, I was a little startled.  I remembered that when I was smoking the pipe I did think I saw the uplifted tentacle moving, as though