of all kinds, and, in the opinion of every servant who had ever lived in
the house, an unimpeachable ghost. All Miss Pew's young ladies believed
firmly in that ghost; and there was a legend of a frizzy-haired girl
from Barbados who had seen the ghost, and had incontinently gone out
of one epileptic fit into another, until her father had come in a
fly--presumably from Barbados--and carried her away for ever, epileptic
to the last.

Nobody at present located at Mauleverer Manor remembered that young lady
from Barbados, nor had any of the existing pupils ever seen the ghost.
But the general faith in him was unshaken. He was described as an elderly
man in a snuff-coloured, square-cut coat, knee-breeches, and silk
stockings rolled up over his knees. He was supposed to be one of the
extinct Mauleverers; harmless and even benevolently disposed; given
to plucking flowers in the garden at dusk; and to gliding along
passages, and loitering on the stairs in a somewhat inane manner. The
bolder-spirited among the girls would have given a twelve-month's
pocket money to see him. Miss Pillby declared that the sight of that
snuff-coloured stranger would be her death.

'I've a weak 'art, you know,' said Miss Pillby, who was not mistress
of her aspirates,--she managed them sometimes, but they often evaded
her,--'the doctor said so when I was quite a little thing.'

'Were you ever a little thing, Pillby?' asked Miss Rylance with superb
disdain, the present Pillby being long and gaunt.

And the group of listeners laughed, with that frank laughter of school
girls keenly alive to the ridiculous in other people. There was as much
difference in the standing of the various bedrooms at Mauleverer Manor as