Page:St Andrews Ghost Stories (1921).djvu/37

Rh could feel, a darkness of a shut-up smothering vault. I felt sick and dazed for a minute or two. I could not make out if I had been struck by the lightning or was paralysed. However, after a bit it passed off; it was a horrible deathly feeling while it lasted. I never experienced a similar sensation before or since, and hope I never may again. Another very curious thing was the behaviour of my favourite collie dog, usually frightened at nothing, on the approach of the phantom (for phantom it was). He crouched down, shivering and whining, and as it drew nearer fled with a bark like a screech, and cowered down in the ditch at the roadside and gave forth low growls.

"I tell you, boys, it's all right in this room to talk about it, but none of you would have liked to be in my place that queer, uncanny night on that lonely road. That it was supernatural, I am convinced; it is a very thin veil between us and the unseen world of spirits.

"They say I possess a seventh sense, namely, second sight, and I know I shall never forget that night's experience.

"But listen—the story is not ended yet. Next morning a telegram arrived from my brother in Kent, 'Are you all right?' I wondered much, and wired back that I was very well.

"The following day a letter came from my brother giving me a curious explanation.

"The following afternoon of the day I saw the coach, my brother was looking out of the old manor house windows in Kent, when he and several others noticed a large bird, having most peculiar plumage, seated on the garden wall. No one had ever seen a bird of the kind before. He was rushing off for a gun to shoot it, when our father, who looked very white and scared, stopped him. 'Do not shoot,' he said, 'it would be of no use. That is the bird of ill omen to all our race, it only appears before a death. I have only once seen it before—that week your dear mother died.'

"My brother was so alarmed at this that he sent the wire I have mentioned to me at St Andrews. By the next mail from Australia we learned that our eldest brother had died there the very day I saw the coach at St Andrews and my brother saw the bird at our old home in Kent. Very odd, is it not; but what