‘They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t, Mister Jarsper!’

‘It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.’

‘Well, it would lead towards a mixing of things,’ Durdles acquiesces:  pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had not previously presented itself to him in a merely inconvenient light, domestically or chronologically.  ’But do you think there may be Ghosts of other things, though not of men and women?’

‘What things?  Flower-beds and watering-pots? horses and harness?’

‘No.  Sounds.’

‘What sounds?’

‘Cries.’

‘What cries do you mean?  Chairs to mend?’

’No.  I mean screeches.  Now I’ll tell you, Mr. Jarsper.  Wait a bit till I put the bottle right.’  Here the cork is evidently taken out again, and replaced again.  ’There!  Now it’s right!  This time last year, only a few days later, I happened to have been doing what was correct by the season, in the way of giving it the welcome it had a right to expect, when them town-boys set on me at their worst.  At length I gave ’em the slip, and turned in here.  And here I fell asleep.  And what woke me?  The ghost of a cry.  The ghost of one terrific shriek, which shriek was followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog:  a long, dismal, woeful howl, such as a dog gives when a person’s dead.  That was my last Christmas Eve.’

‘What do you mean?’ is the very abrupt, and, one might say, fierce retort.

’I mean that I made inquiries everywhere about, and, that no living ears but mine heard either that cry or that howl.  So I say they was both ghosts; though why they came to me, I’ve never made out.’

‘I thought you were another kind of man,’ says Jasper, scornfully.

‘So I thought myself,’ answers Durdles with his usual composure; ‘and yet I was picked out for it.’

Jasper had risen suddenly, when he asked him what he meant, and he now says, ‘Come; we shall freeze here; lead the way.’

Durdles complies, not over-steadily; opens the door at the top of the steps with the key he has already used; and so emerges on the Cathedral level, in a passage at the side of the chancel.  Here, the moonlight is so very bright again that the colours of the nearest stained-glass window are thrown upon their faces.  The appearance of the unconscious Durdles, holding the door open for his companion to follow, as if from the grave, is ghastly enough, with a purple hand across his face, and a yellow splash upon his brow; but he bears the close scrutiny of his companion in an insensible way, although it is prolonged while the latter fumbles among his pockets for a key confided to him that will open an iron gate, so to enable them to pass to the staircase of the great tower.

‘That and the bottle are enough for you to carry,’ he says, giving it to Durdles; ’hand your bundle to me; I am younger and longer-winded than you.’  Durdles hesitates for a moment between bundle and bottle; but gives the preference to the bottle as being by far the better company, and consigns the dry weight to his fellow-explorer.