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72 people won't be pumped; they only tell you what they choose to, or are permitted to reveal."

"If they really do turn up and talk to you as you say they do, why on earth can't you get them to talk some useful sense?"

"I really can't force their confidence," said Greenbracket, "all they do tell me voluntarily is most interesting and absorbing. This Sir Rodger planned numerous very important structural alterations in the Cathedral and elsewhere."

"It is all very odd to me," I said, "one meets people with strange ideas. I met a man years ago at Aberystwith who was a firm believer in the transmigration of souls. He said he quite remembered being a cab horse in Glasgow, and was certain when he left this planet he would become a parrot in Mars."

"I don't understand that sort of thing a bit," said my extraordinary friend, Greenbracket, "but Sir Rodger de Wanklyn has sometimes to visit the Valley of Fire and Frost, where there are mighty furnaces on one side of him and ice and snow on the other and it is very painful."

"I had that sort of experience the other day," I remarked, "at a meeting. On one side was a furnace of a fire and on the other a window wide open with a biting frost wind blowing in."

"Tuts," said Greenbracket "that's here; I am talking of the spirit world."

"Hang! your spirit stuff. Has your butler, Amos Bradleigh, seen any spookey things lately?"

"Yes, he is much annoyed by the spirit of an evil old housekeeper here who lost her life by falling downstairs, and she is continually pushing him down my cellar stairs. He is furious."

"Is this butler of yours any connection of Jeremiah Anklebone?" I asked.

"Yes, he is a cousin," said Greenbracket; "all that family have second sight, and see and dream strange things."

"And who," I asked, "may this housekeeper be who pitched your butler down stairs?"

"Oh," said Greenbracket, "she's a badly constituted raith, and her name is Annibal Strongthorn. She was housekeeper ages ago to this Sir Roger de Wanklyn in this very old house we are in."