newly-made hay-cock and watched the vehicle until it came to a bend in
the avenue where there is a clump of trees which obscured it from my
view. As it did not, however, reappear, I concluded that the occupants
had either stopped for some reason or had taken by mistake a cart-way
leading to the back gate into the garden. Hastily putting on my coat, I
went down to the bend in the avenue, but to my surprise there was nothing
to be seen.

"Returning to the Rectory, I met my housekeeper, who has been with me for
nearly twenty years, and I told her what I had seen. She then told me
that about a month before, while I was away from home, my man had one day
gone with the trap to the station. She saw, just as I did, a trap coming
up the avenue until it was lost to sight owing to the intervention of the
clump of trees. As it did not come on, she went down to the bend, but
there was no trap to be seen. When the man came in some half-hour after,
my housekeeper asked him if he had come half-way up the avenue and turned
back, but he said he had only that minute come straight from the station.
My housekeeper said she did not like to tell me about it before, as she
thought I 'would have laughed at her.' Whether the 'spectral gig' which I
saw and the 'phantom coach' which my wife and I have often heard are one
and the same I know not, but I do know that what I saw in the full blaze
of the summer sun was not inspired by a dose of the spirits referred to
by my friend the parish priest.

"Some time during the winter of 1912, I was in the motor-house one dark
evening at about 6 P.M. I was working at the engine, and as the car was
'nose in' first, I was, of course, at the farthest point from the door.
I had sent my man down to the village with a message. He was gone about
ten minutes when I heard heavy footsteps enter the yard and come over to
the motor-house. I 'felt' that there was some one in the house quite