immediate explanation with your father on the subject nearest my heart, and depart while I have a change of dress left. On his answer will my return depend! In the meantime tell me candidly,—I ask it in all seriousness and as a friend,—am I not a dupe to your well-known propensity to hoaxing? have you not a hand in—'
'No, by heaven I Seaforth; I see what you mean: on my honour, I am as much mystified as yourself: and if your servant—'
'Not he:—-if there be a trick, he at least is not privy to it.'
'If there be a trick? Why, Charles, do you think—'
'I know not what to think, Tom. As surely as you are a living man, so surely did that spectral anatomy visit my room again last night, grin in my face, and walk away with my trousers, nor was I able to spring from my bed, or break the chain which seemed to bind me to my pillow.'
'Seaforth!' said Ingoldsby, after a short pause, 'I will—But hush! here are the girls and my father.—I will carry off the females, and leave you a clear field with the governor: carry your point with him, and we will talk about your breeches afterwards.'
Tom's diversion was successful; he carried off the ladies en masse to look at a remarkable specimen of the class Dodecandria Monogynia,—which they could not find:—while Seaforth marched boldly up to the encounter, and carried 'the governor's' outworks by a coup de main. I shall not stop to describe the progress of the attack: suffice it that it was as successful as could have been wished, and that Seaforth was referred back again to the lady. The happy lover was off at a tangent; the botanical party was soon overtaken; and the arm of Caroline, whom a vain endeavour to spell out the Linnaan name of a daffy-down-dilly had detained a little in the rear of the others, was soon firmly locked in his own.
'What was the world to them,
Its noise, its nonsense, and its 'breeches' all?'
Seaforth was in the seventh heaven; he retired to his room that night as happy as if no such thing as a goblin had ever been heard of, and personal chattels were as well fenced in by law as real property. Not so Tom Ingoldsby: the mystery,—for mystery there evidently was,—had not only piqued his curiosity, but ruffled his temper. The watch of the previous night had been unsuccessful, probably because it was undisguised. To-night he would 'ensconce himself,'—not indeed 'behind the arras,'—for the little that remained was, as we have seen, nailed to the wall,—but in a small closet which opened from one corner of the room, and, by leaving the door ajar, would give to its occupant a view of all that might pass in the
