and our grog on the table, when Allan Beauchamp suddenly remarked—"It's a deuced curious thing for a man to be always followed about the place by a confounded grinning skull."
"Eh, what," I said, "who the deuce is being followed about by a skull? It's rubbish, and quite impossible."
"Not a bit," said my friend, "I've had a skull after me more or less for several years."
"It sounds like a remark a lunatic would make," I rejoined rather crossly. "Do not talk bunkum. You'll go dotty if you believe such infernal rot."
"It is not bunkum or rot a bit," said Allan, "Its gospel truth. Ask Truffles, ask Jack Weston, or Jimmy Darkgood, or any of my south country pals."
"I don't know Jack Weston or Jimmy Darkgood," I said, "but tell me the whole story, and some day, if it's good, I'll put it in the St Andrews Citizen."
"It's mostly about St Andrews," said Beauchamp, "so here goes, but shove on some coals first."
I did so, and then requested him to fire away.
"It was long, long ago, I think about the year 1513, that one of my ancestors, a man called Neville de Beauchamp, resided in Scotland. It seems he was an uncommonly wild dog, went in for racing and cards, and could take his wine and ale with any of them even in those hard-drinking days. He was known as Flash Neville. Later on he married a pretty girl, the daughter of a silk mercer in Perth, who, it seems, died (they said of a broken heart) two years after. Neville de Beauchamp was seized with awful remorse, and became shortly after a monk in Greyfriars Monastery at St Andrews. After Neville's wife's death, her relations seem to have been on the hunt after him, burning for revenge, and the girl's brother, a rough, wild dog in those stormy days, at last managed to track his quarry down in the monastery at St Andrews."
'Very interesting," I said, "that monastery stood very nearly on the site of the present infant school, and we found the well in 1880. Well, what did this brother do, eh?"
"It seems that one afternoon after vespers he forced his way into the Monastery Chapel, sought out Neville de Beau-
