“Doyle, what book are you reading?”

“Oh, it’s called ‘Denneker’s Meditations.’  It’s a rum lot, Janette gave it to me; she happened to have two copies.  Want to see it?”

He tossed me the volume, which opened as it fell.  On one of the exposed pages was a marked passage: 

“To sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart from the body for a season; for, as concerning rills which would flow across each other the weaker is borne along by the stronger, so there be certain of kin whose paths intersecting, their souls do bear company, the while their bodies go fore-appointed ways, unknowing.”

“She had—­she has—­a singular taste in reading,” I managed to say, mastering my agitation.

“Yes.  And now perhaps you will have the kindness to explain how you knew her name and that of the ship she sailed in.”

“You talked of her in your sleep,” I said.

A week later we were towed into the port of New York.  But the Morrow was never heard from.

THE MIDDLE TOE OF THE RIGHT FOOT

I

It is well known that the old Manton house is haunted.  In all the rural district near about, and even in the town of Marshall, a mile away, not one person of unbiased mind entertains a doubt of it; incredulity is confined to those opinionated persons who will be called “cranks” as soon as the useful word shall have penetrated the intellectual demesne of the Marshall Advance.  The evidence that the house is haunted is of two kinds:  the testimony of disinterested witnesses who have had ocular proof, and that of the house itself.  The former may be disregarded and ruled out on any of the various grounds of objection which may be urged against it by the ingenious; but facts within the observation of all are material and controlling.

In the first place, the Manton house has been unoccupied by mortals for more than ten years, and with its outbuildings is slowly falling into decay—­a circumstance which in itself the judicious will hardly venture to ignore.  It stands a little way off the loneliest reach of the Marshall and Harriston road, in an opening which was once a farm and is still disfigured with strips of rotting fence and half covered with brambles overrunning a stony and sterile soil long unacquainted with the plow.  The house itself is in tolerably good condition, though badly weather-stained and in dire need of attention from the glazier, the smaller male population of the region having attested in the manner of its kind its disapproval of dwelling without dwellers.  It is two stories in height, nearly square, its front pierced by a single doorway flanked on each side by a window boarded up to the very top.  Corresponding windows above, not protected, serve to admit light and rain to the rooms of the upper floor.  Grass and weeds grow pretty rankly all