Nearly every other Station owns a ghost.  There are said to be two at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dak-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’ Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is something—­not fever—­wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad.  The older Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares.

Some of the dak-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cemeteries in their compound—­witnesses to the “changes and chances of this mortal life” in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest.  These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in.  They are generally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow.  He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age.  In both moods he is useless.  If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib’s service not a khansamah in the Province could touch him.  Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.

In these dak-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when found, they should be made a note of.  Not long ago it was my business to live in dak-bungalows.  I never inhabited the same house for three nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed.  I lived in Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at the threshold to give welcome.  I lived in “converted” ones—­old houses officiating as dak-bungalows—­where nothing was in its proper place and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner.  I lived in second-hand palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through a broken pane.  I lived in dak-bungalows where the last entry in the visitors’ book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-kid’s head with a sword.  It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case.  Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dak-bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts.  A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in dak-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.