apartments, to ascertain whether the noise could have proceeded thence; but found the two maids fast asleep.
RATS—that is my explanation of the tread along the gallery.
Barbara, now Mrs. L. F. Burnard, used to say as a child that she often saw a lady in blue, who would visit the nursery, stoop over her, look at her, and sometimes sit beside her bed.
When Diana, now Mrs. H. M. Batten, was dangerously ill, we had a trained nurse to attend her. One night the nurse had dozed off, when a tap came at the door, and a female voice said: "It is time for her to have her medicine." The nurse started up, ran to the door and opened it. No one was there, and my wife had not gone to warn the nurse. Another servant, doubtless.
When little Beatrice was ill, cutting teeth and with whooping-cough, I did not think that the nurse-girl was sufficiently alert to attend to her, and so advised my wife to go into the bedroom, and sleep with Beatrice. I was then in the room in which Old Madam died, above the drawing-room. I was awoke about the middle of the night by my wife, who came in and said: "I cannot sleep. I hear people tramping, carrying something down the stairs."
I sat up and argued with her. It was a windy night, and the noise might be caused by the gale. As I was speaking there sounded three heavy strokes as if made by a clenched fist against the partition between the bedroom and the dressing-room.
"It is only the starting of the timber," said I, and I induced my wife to go back to her bed.
Next day, so little did we think that Beatrice was in a serious condition, that we went off to make a call in Launceston. On our return I was sitting in the drawing-room, and my wife fetched the child, who was dressed, and took her down into the library. I heard a cry, and ran in, and found that the child had died on her mother's knees. Her coffin was carried down the staircase, as my wife had heard on the night before her death.
In 1918, the last year of the war, my youngest daughter, Mrs. Calmady-Hamlyn, with her two children and a couple of nurses came to live with me at Lew, as her husband was in Palestine and Syria. Both nurses gave notice. They had been frightened by seeing a female form at night walking in the nursery, and
