Page:Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 5.djvu/188

178 glory half-way up the woodbine trellis, I saw two things which caused me to feel that the horrors of the night were not all imaginary.

Just outside the back bedroom door was a damp place, as if that part of the floor had been newly washed; and when, goaded by curiosity, I peeped through the keyhole of the haunted chamber, my eye distinctly saw an open razor lying on a dusty table.

My vision was limited to that one object, but it was quite enough, and I went up the hill brooding darkly over the secret hidden in my breast. I longed to tell some one, but was ashamed, and, when asked why so pale and absent-minded, I answered, with a gloomy smile,

"It is the clams."

All day I hid my sufferings pretty well, but as night approached, and I thought of another lonely vigil in the haunted cottage, my heart began to fail, and, when we sat telling stories in the dusk, a brilliant idea came into my head.

I would relate my ghost story, and rouse the curiosity of the listeners to such a pitch that some