Ghost Stories of an Antiquary | Page 2

likely enough--with additions from the magazines, as I said. You
never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not;
nobody has that ever I came across.'
'From the way in which you said that, I gather that you have.'
'I really don't know; but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my
private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven't any explanation of it.
'The school I mean was near London. It was established in a large and
fairly old house--a great white building with very fine grounds about it;

there were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the
older gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or
four fields which we used for our games. I think probably it was quite
an attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess
any tolerable features.
'I came to the school in a September, soon after the year 1870; and
among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to:
a Highland boy, whom I will call McLeod. I needn't spend time in
describing him: the main thing is that I got to know him very well. He
was not an exceptional boy in any way--not particularly good at books
or games--but he suited me.
'The school was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130
boys there as a rule, and so a considerable staff of masters was required,
and there were rather frequent changes among them.
'One term--perhaps it was my third or fourth--a new master made his
appearance. His name was Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale,
black-bearded man. I think we liked him: he had travelled a good deal,
and had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was
some competition among us to get within earshot of him. I remember
too--dear me, I have hardly thought of it since then!--that he had a
charm on his watch-chain that attracted my attention one day, and he let
me examine it. It was, I now suppose, a gold Byzantine coin; there was
an effigy of some absurd emperor on one side; the other side had been
worn practically smooth, and he had had cut on it--rather
barbarously--his own initials, G.W.S., and a date, 24 July, 1865. Yes, I
can see it now: he told me he had picked it up in Constantinople: it was
about the size of a florin, perhaps rather smaller.
'Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing
Latin grammar with us. One of his favourite methods--perhaps it is
rather a good one--was to make us construct sentences out of our own
heads to illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn. Of course
that is a thing which gives a silly boy a chance of being impertinent:
there are lots of school stories in which that happens--or anyhow there
might be. But Sampson was too good a disciplinarian for us to think of

trying that on with him. Now, on this occasion he was telling us how to
express remembering in Latin: and he ordered us each to make a
sentence bringing in the verb memini, "I remember." Well, most of us
made up some ordinary sentence such as "I remember my father," or
"He remembers his book," or something equally uninteresting: and I
dare say a good many put down memino librum meum, and so forth: but
the boy I mentioned--McLeod--was evidently thinking of something
more elaborate than that. The rest of us wanted to have our sentences
passed, and get on to something else, so some kicked him under the
desk, and I, who was next to him, poked him and whispered to him to
look sharp. But he didn't seem to attend. I looked at his paper and saw
he had put down nothing at all. So I jogged him again harder than
before and upbraided him sharply for keeping us all waiting. That did
have some effect. He started and seemed to wake up, and then very
quickly he scribbled about a couple of lines on his paper, and showed it
up with the rest. As it was the last, or nearly the last, to come in, and as
Sampson had a good deal to say to the boys who had written
meminiscimus patri meo and the rest of it, it turned out that the clock
struck twelve before he had got to McLeod, and McLeod had to wait
afterwards to have his sentence corrected. There was nothing much
going on outside when I got out, so I waited for him to come. He came
very slowly when he did arrive, and