The Beckoning Monk.
Many years ago, about the time of the Tay Bridge gale, I was staying at Edinburgh with a friend of mine, an actor manager. I had just come down from the paint-room of the theatre, and was emerging from the stage-door, when I encountered Miss Elsie H———, a then well-known actress.
"You are just the very person I wanted to meet," she said. "Allow me to introduce you to my friend, Mr Spencer Ashton. He's not an actor, he's an artist, and he's got such a queer, queer story about ghosts and things near your beloved St Andrews."
I bowed to Mr Ashton, who was a quiet-looking man, pale and thin, rather like a benevolent animated hairpin. He reminded me somehow of Fred Vokes. We shook hands warmly.
"Yes," he said, "my story sounds like fiction, but it is a fact, as I can prove. It is rather long, but it may possibly interest you. Where could we foregather?"
"Come and dine with me at the Edinburgh Hotel to-night at eight. I'll get a private room," I said.
"Right oh!" said he, and we parted.
That evening at eight o'clock we met at the old Edinburgh Hotel (now no longer in existence), and after dinner he told me his very remarkable tale.
"Some years ago," he said, I was staying in a small coast town in Fife, not very far from St Andrews. I was painting some quaint houses and things of the sort that tickled my fancy at the time, and I was very much amused and excited by some of the bogie tales told me by the fisher folk. One story particularly interested me."
"And what was that?" I asked.
"Well, it was about a strange, dwarfish, old man, who, they
