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“Now look here, never you mind Evans and the box; what’s become of your uncle and the gun?”

“The gun! What gun?”

“Why, the gun that your uncle used to keep in the garden, and that wasn’t there. What did he do with it? Did he kill any of these people with it–these Jacobses and Evanses and Scrogginses and Josephses? Because, if so, it was a good and useful work, and we should enjoy hearing about it.”

“No–oh no–how could he?–he had been built up alive in the wall, you know, and when Edward IV spoke to the abbot about it, my sister said that in her then state of health she could not and would not, as it was endangering the child’s life. So they christened it Horatio, after her own son, who had been killed at Waterloo before he was born, and Lord Napier himself said–“

“Look here, do you know what you are talking about?” we asked him at this point.

He said “No,” but he knew it was every word of it true, because his aunt had seen it herself. Whereupon we covered him over with the tablecloth, and he went to sleep.

And then Uncle told us a story.

Uncle said his was a real story.

THE GHOST OF THE BLUE CHAMBER
(My Uncle’s Story)

“I don’t want to make you fellows nervous,” began my uncle in a peculiarly impressive, not to say blood-curdling, tone of voice, “and if you would rather that I did not mention it, I won’t; but, as a matter of fact, this very house, in which we are now sitting, is haunted.”

“You don’t say that!” exclaimed Mr. Coombes.

“What’s the use of your saying I don’t say it when I have just said it?” retorted my uncle somewhat pettishly. “You do talk so foolishly. I tell you the house is haunted. Regularly on Christmas Eve the Blue Chamber [they called the room next to the nursery the ‘blue chamber,’ at my uncle’s, most of the toilet service being of that shade] is haunted by the ghost of a sinful man–a man who once killed a Christmas wait with a lump of coal.”

“How did he do it?” asked Mr. Coombes, with eager anxiousness. “Was it difficult?”

“I do not know how he did it,” replied my uncle; “he did not explain the process. The wait had taken up a position just inside the front gate, and was singing a ballad. It is presumed that, when he opened his mouth for B flat, the lump of coal was thrown by the sinful man from one of the windows, and that it went down the wait’s throat and choked him.”

“You want to be a good shot, but it is certainly worth trying,” murmured Mr. Coombes thoughtfully.

“But that was not his only crime, alas!” added my uncle. “Prior to that he had killed a solo cornet-player.”

“No! Is that really a fact?” exclaimed Mr. Coombes.

“Of course it’s a fact,” answered my uncle testily; “at all events, as much a fact as you can expect to get in a case of this sort.

“How very captious you are this evening. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. The poor fellow, the cornet-player, had been in the neighbourhood barely a month. Old Mr. Bishop, who kept the ‘Jolly Sand Boys’ at the time, and from whom I had the story, said he had never known a more hard-working and energetic solo cornet-player. He, the cornet-player, only knew two tunes, but Mr. Bishop said that the man could not have played with more vigour, or for more hours in a day, if he had known forty. The two tunes he did play were “Annie Laurie” and “Home, Sweet Home”; and as regarded his performance of the former melody, Mr. Bishop said that a mere child could have told what it was meant for.

“This musician–this poor, friendless artist used to come regularly and play in this street just opposite for two hours every evening. One evening he was seen, evidently in response to an invitation, going into this very house, BUT WAS NEVER SEEN COMING OUT OF IT!”