"You--you don't know the recipe, do you?" asked Mr. Coombes.

"Unfortunately I do not," replied my uncle; "but the chief
ingredient was said to have been railway refreshment-room pork-pie.

"I forget the man's other crimes," my uncle went on; "I used to
know them all at one time, but my memory is not what it was. I do
not, however, believe I am doing his memory an injustice in
believing that he was not entirely unconnected with the death, and
subsequent burial, of a gentleman who used to play the harp with
his toes; and that neither was he altogether unresponsible for the
lonely grave of an unknown stranger who had once visited the
neighbourhood, an Italian peasant lad, a performer upon the barrel-
organ.

"Every Christmas Eve," said my uncle, cleaving with low impressive
tones the strange awed silence that, like a shadow, seemed to have
slowly stolen into and settled down upon the room, "the ghost of
this sinful man haunts the Blue Chamber, in this very house.
There, from midnight until cock-crow, amid wild muffled shrieks and
groans and mocking laughter and the ghostly sound of horrid blows,
it does fierce phantom fight with the spirits of the solo cornet-
player and the murdered wait, assisted at intervals, by the shades
of the German band; while the ghost of the strangled harpist plays
mad ghostly melodies with ghostly toes on the ghost of a broken
harp.

Uncle said the Blue Chamber was comparatively useless as a
sleeping-apartment on Christmas Eve.