"So I did; but how do you know it's a copper?"

"Who else could it be at this time of night? Stay where you are, Gilly. I'll go down and see." And in a moment there was a new tune from the hall below: "Why, it's Colonel Cheffins!... How sporting of you, colonel!... Yes, come on up and I'll tell you all about it."

The colonel's answers were at first inaudible up above; but on the stairs he was explaining that he had awakened about an hour ago with a conviction that yet another house had been attacked, that in his inability to get to sleep again he had ultimately risen, and seeing a light still burning across the road, had ventured to come over to inquire whether we were still all right. And with that there entered the Jaeger dressing-suit and bedroom slippers, containing a very different colonel from the dapper edition I had seen out on the other side of midnight, and for that matter but a worn and feeble copy of the one we had both admired the night before.

"That's Witching Hill all over!" cried Uvo as he ushered him in. "You dreamed of what actually happened at the very time it was actually happening. And yet our friend Gillon can't see that the whole place is haunted and enchanted from end to end!"

"I'm not sure that I should go as far as that," said the colonel, sinking into a chair, while Delavoye mixed a stiff drink for him in his old glass. "In fact, now you come to put it that way, I'm not so sure that it was a dream at all. I sleep with my window open, at the front of the house, and I rather thought I heard shots of sorts."

"Of such a sort," laughed Uvo, "that you must be a light sleeper if they woke you up. Do you mind telling me, colonel, where you used to keep those cartridges you were kind enough to give me?"

"In my washstand drawer. I hope there was nothing the matter with them?"

"They wouldn't go off. That was all."

"God bless my soul!" cried Colonel Cheffins, putting down his glass. "The caps were all right, but I am afraid you can't have kept your powder quite dry, colonel. I expect you've been swilling out that drawer in the heat of your ablutions. Devil a bullet would leave the barrel, and I tried all three."

"But what an infernal disgrace!" cried the colonel, shuffling to his slippered feet. "Why, the damned things ought to go off if you raised them from the bottom of the sea! I'll let the makers have it in next week's _Field_, libel or no libel, you see if I don't! 

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