"What an ugly name," said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.

"She's descended from the de la Bliques, an old Huguenot family of
Touraine, you know."

"There weren't any Huguenots in Touraine," said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard,
who thought she might safelydispute any fact that was three hundred

years old.
"Well, anyhow, she's coming to stay with me," continued Mrs.

Norbury, bringing her story quickly down to the present day, "she
arrives this evening, and she's highly clairvoyante, a seventh

daughter of a seventh daughter, you now, and all that sort of
thing."

"How very interesting," said the chinchilla voice; "Exwood is just
the right place for her to come to, isn't it? There are supposed to

be several ghosts there."
"That is why she was so anxious to come," said Mrs. Norbury; "she

put off another engagement in order to accept my invitation. She's
had visions and dreams, and all those sort of things, that have come

true in a most marvellous manner, but she's never actually seen a
ghost, and she's longing to have that experience. She belongs to

that Research Society, you know."
"I expect she'll see the unhappy Lady Cullumpton, the most famous of

all the Exwood ghosts," said Mrs. Dole; "my ancestor, you know, Sir
Gervase Cullumpton, murdered his young bride in a fit of jealousy

while they were on a visit to Exwood. He strangled her in the
stables with a stirrup leather, just after they had come in from

riding, and she is seen sometimes at dusk going about the lawns and
the stable yard, in a long green habit, moaning and trying to get

the thong from round her throat. I shall be most interested to hear
if your friend sees--"

"I don't know why she should be expected to see a trashy,
traditional apparition like the so-called Cullumpton ghost, that is

only vouched for by housemaids and tipsy stable-boys, when my uncle,
who was the owner of Exwood, committed suicide there under the most

tragical circumstances, and most certainly haunts the place."
"Mrs. Hatch-Mallard has evidently never read Popple's County

History," said Mrs. Dole icily, "or she would know that the
Cullumpton ghost has a wealth of evidence behind it--"

"Oh, Popple!" exclaimed Mrs. Hatch-Mallard scornfully; "any rubbishy
old story is good enough for him. Popple, indeed! Now my uncle's

ghost was seen by a Rural Dean, who was also a Justice of the Peace.
I should think that would be good enough testimony for any one.

Mrs. Norbury, I shall take it as a deliberate personal affront if
your clairvoyante friend sees any other ghost except that of my

uncle."
"I daresay she won't see anything at all; she never has yet, you

know," said Mrs. Norbury hopefully.
"It was a most unfortunate topic for me to have broached," she

lamented afterwards to the owner of the chinchilla voice; "Exwood
belongs to Mrs. Hatch-Mallard, and we've only got it on a short

lease. A nephew of hers has been wanting to live there for some
time, and if we offend her in any way she'll refuse to renew the

lease. I sometimes think these garden-parties are a mistake."
The Norburys played bridge for the next three nights till nearly one

o'clock; they did not care for the game, but it reduced the time at
their guest's disposal for undesirableghostly visitations.

"Miss Bleek is not likely to be in a frame of mind to see ghosts,"
said Hugo Norbury, "if she goes to bed with her brain awhirl with

royal spades and no trumps and grand slams."
"I've talked to her for hours about Mrs. Hatch-Mallard's uncle,"

said his wife, "and pointed out the exact spot where he killed
himself, and invented all sorts of impressive details, and I've

found an old portrait of Lord John Russell and put it in her room,
and told her that it's supposed to be a picture of the uncle in

middle age. If Ada does see a ghost at all it certainly ought to be
old Hatch-Mallard's. At any rate, we've done our best."

The precautions were in vain. On the third morning of her stay Ada
Bleek came down late to breakfast, her eyes looking very tired, but

ablaze with excitement, her hair done anyhow, and a large brown
volume hugged under her arm.

"At last I've seen something supernatural!" she exclaimed, and gave
Mrs. Norbury a fervent kiss, as though in gratitude for the

opportunity afforded her.
"A ghost!" cried Mrs. Norbury, "not really!"

"Really and unmistakably!"
"Was it an oldish man in the dress of about fifty years ago?" asked

Mrs. Norbury hopefully.
"Nothing of the sort," said Ada; "it was a white hedgehog."

"A white hedgehog!" exclaimed both the Norburys, in tones of
disconcerted astonishment.

"A huge white hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes," said Ada; "I was
lying half asleep in bed when suddenly I felt a sensation as of

something sinister and unaccountable passing through the room. I
sat up and looked round, and there, under the window, I saw an evil,

creeping thing, a sort of monstroushedgehog, of a dirty white
colour, with black, loathsome claws that clicked and scraped along

the floor, and narrow, yellow eyes of indescribable evil. It
slithered along for a yard or two, always looking at me with its

cruel, hideous eyes, then, when it reached the second window, which
was open it clambered up the sill and vanished. I got up at once

and went to the window; there wasn't a sign of it anywhere. Of
course, I knew it must be something from another world, but it was

not till I turned up Popple's chapter on local traditions that I
realised what I had seen."

She turned eagerly to the large brown volume and read: "'Nicholas
Herison, an old miser, was hung at Batchford in 1763 for the murder

of a farm lad who had accidentally discovered his secret hoard. His
ghost is supposed to traverse the countryside, appearing sometimes

as a white owl, sometimes as a huge white hedgehog."
"I expect you read the Popple story overnight, and that made you

THINK you saw a hedgehog when you were only half awake," said Mrs.
Norbury, hazarding a conjecture that probably came very near the

truth.
Ada scouted the possibility of such a solution of her apparition.

"This must be hushed up," said Mrs. Norbury quickly; "the servants--
"

"Hushed up!" exclaimed Ada, indignantly; "I'm writing a long report
on it for the Research Society."

It was then that Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of
brilliant resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of his

life.
"It was very wicked of us, Miss Bleek," he said, "but it would be a

shame to let it go further. That white hedgehog is an old joke of
ours; stuffed albino hedgehog, you know, that my father brought home

from Jamaica, where they grow to enormous size. We hide it in the
room with a string on it, run one end of the string through the

window; then we pull if from below and it comes scraping along the
floor, just as you've described, and finally jerks out of the

window. Taken in heaps of people; they all read up Popple and think
it's old Harry Nicholson's ghost; we always stop them from writing

to the papers about it, though. That would be carrying matters too
far."

Mrs. Hatch-Mallard renewed the lease in due course, but Ada Bleek
has never renewed her friendship.

THE MAPPINED LIFE
"These Mappin Terraces at the Zoological Gardens are a great

improvement on the old style of wild-beast cage," said Mrs. James
Gurtleberry, putting down an illustrated paper; "they give one the

illusion of seeing the animals in their natural surroundings. I
wonder how much of the illusion is passed on to the animals?"

"That would depend on the animal," said her niece; "a jungle-fowl,
for instance, would no doubt think its lawfuljungle surroundings

were faithfully reproduced if you gave it a sufficiency of wives, a
goodly variety of seed food and ants' eggs, a commodious bank of

loose earth to dust itself in, a convenient roosting tree, and a