In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them.  Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant’s method of handling them, as shown in “The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories.”  I am now in the Opposition.

We will call the bungalow Katmal dak-bungalow.  But that was the smallest part of the horror.  A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in dak-bungalows.  He should marry.  Katmal dak-bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired.  The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and the windows were nearly black with grime.  It stood on a bypath largely used by native Sub-Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to Forests; but real Sahibs were rare.  The khansamah, who was nearly bent double with old age, said so.

When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside.  The khansamah completely lost his head on my arrival.  He had served a Sahib once.  Did I know that Sahib?  He gave me the name of a well-known man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth.  I had seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.

The day shut in and the khansamah went to get me food.  He did not go through the, pretense of calling it “khana”—­man’s victuals.  He said “ratub,” and that means, among other things, “grub”—­dog’s rations.  There was no insult in his choice of the term.  He had forgotten the other word, I suppose.

While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself down, after exploring the dak-bungalow.  There were three rooms, beside my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars.  The bungalow was a very solid one, but the partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built in their flimsiness.  Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls.  For this reason I shut the door.  There were no lamps—­only candles in long glass shades.  An oil wick was set in the bathroom.

For bleak, unadulterated misery that dak-bungalow was the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in.  There was no fireplace, and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless.  The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy palms rattled and roared.  Half a dozen jackals went through the compound singing, and a hyena stood afar off and mocked them.  A hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead—­the worst sort of Dead.  Then came the ratub—­a curious meal, half native and half English in composition—­with the old khansamah babbling behind my chair about dead and gone English people, and the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the mosquito-curtains.  It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others that he intended to commit if he lived.