gave a sigh of relief, and the shade came back to his cheek.

"It's all right," he murmured; "I was afraid it was the cock."

"Oh, it's too early for that," I said. "Why, it's only the middle
of the night."

"Oh, that doesn't make any difference to those cursed chickens," he
replied bitterly. "They would just as soon crow in the middle of
the night as at any other time--sooner, if they thought it would
spoil a chap's evening out. I believe they do it on purpose."

He said a friend of his, the ghost of a man who had killed a water-
rate collector, used to haunt a house in Long Acre, where they kept
fowls in the cellar, and every time a policeman went by and flashed
his bull's-eye down the grating, the old cock there would fancy it
was the sun, and start crowing like mad; when, of course, the poor
ghost had to dissolve, and it would, in consequence, get back home
sometimes as early as one o'clock in the morning, swearing
fearfully because it had only been out for an hour.

I agreed that it seemed very unfair.

"Oh, it's an absurd arrangement altogether," he continued, quite
angrily. "I can't imagine what our old man could have been
thinking of when he made it. As I have said to him, over and over
again, 'Have a fixed time, and let everybody stick to it--say four
o'clock in summer, and six in winter. Then one would know what one
was about.'"