imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly compressed versions of stories out of books.”
“Nowadays the Strand and Pearson's, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.”
“No doubt: they weren't born or thought of in my time. Let’s see. I wonder if 1 can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, ‘I've seen it,’ and died.”
“Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?”
“I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the passage at night, opened his door, and saw some one crawling towards him on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me think——— Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a
