"The winter," I added, "seems to have
begun in earnest."

Although the corner in which he sat was so
dim that I could distinguish none of his features
very clearly, I saw that his eyes were still
turned full upon me. And yet he answered
never a word.

At any other time I should have felt, and
perhaps expressed, some annoyance, but at the
moment I felt too ill to do either. The icy
coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very
marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach
was affecting me with an intolerable nausea. I
shivered from head to foot, and, turning to my
left-hand neighbour, asked if he had any objection
to an open window?

He neither spoke nor stirred.

I repeated the question somewhat more loudly,
but with the same result. Then I lost patience,
and let the sash down. As I did so, the leather
strap broke in my hand, and I observed that the
glass was covered with a thick coat of mildew,
the accumulation, apparently, of years. My
attention being thus drawn to the condition of
the coach, I examined it more narrowly, and
saw by the uncertain light of the outer lamps
that it was in the last state of dilapidation.
Every part of it was not only out of repair, but
in a condition of decay. The sashes splintered
at a touch. The leather flttings were crusted
over with mould, and literally rotting from the
woodwork. The floor was almost breaking away
beneath my feet. The whole machine, in short,
was foul with damp, and had evidently been
dragged from some outhouse in which it had
been mouldering away for years, to do another
day or two of duty on the road.

I turned to the third passenger, whom I had
not yet addressed, and hazarded one more remark.

"This coach," I said, "is in a deplorable
condition. The regular mail, I suppose, is under
repair?"

He moved his head slowly, and looked me in
the face, without speaking a word. I shall never
forget that look while I live. I turned cold at
heart under it. I turn cold at heart even now
when I recal it. His eyes glowed with a fiery
unnatural lustre. His face was livid as the face
of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back
as if in the agony of death, and showed the
gleaming teeth between.

The words that I was about to utter died
upon my lips, and a strange horrora dreadful
horror—came upon me. My sight had by
this time become used to the gloom of the
coach, and I could see with tolerable distinctness.
I turned to my opposite neighbour.
He, too, was looking at me, with the same
startling pallor in his face, and the same
stony glitter in his eyes. I passed my baud
across my brow. I turned to the passenger on
the seat beside my own, and saw—oh Heaven!
how shall I describe what I saw ? I saw that he
was no living man—that none of them were
living men, like myself! A pale phosphorescent
light—the light of putrefaction—played upon
their awful faces; upon their hair, dank with
the dews of the grave; upon their clothes,
earth-stained and dropping to pieces; upon
their hands, which were as the hands of corpses
long buried. Only their eyes, their terrible eyes,
were living; and those eyes were all turned
menacingly upon me!

A shriek of terror, a wild unintelligible cry
for help and mercy, burst from my lips as I
flung myself against the door, and strove in vain
to open it.

In that single instant, brief and vivid as a
landscape beheld in the flash of summer lightning, I
saw the moon shining down through a rift of
stormy cloud—the ghastly sign-post rearing its
warning finger by the wayside—the broken
parapet—the plunging horses—the black gulf
below. Then, the coach reeled like a ship at sea.
Then, came a mighty crash—a sense of crushing
pain—and then, darkness.

It seemed as if years had gone by when I
awoke one morning from a deep sleep, and found
my wife watching by my bedside. I will pass
over the scene that ensued, and give you, in
half a dozen words, the tale she told me with
tears of thanksgiving. I had fallen over a
precipice, close against the junction of the
old coach-road and the new, and had only been
saved from certain death by lighting upon a deep
snowdrift that had accumulated at the foot of
the rock beneath. In this snowdrift I was
discovered at daybreak, by a couple of shepherds,
who carried me to the nearest shelter, and
brought a surgeon to my aid. The surgeon found
me in a state of raving delirium, with a broken
arm and a compound fracture of the skull. The
letters in my pocket-book showed my name and
address; my wife was summoned to nurse me;
and, thanks to youth and a fine constitution, I
came out of danger at last. The place of my fall,
I need scarcely say, was precisely that at which
a frightful accident had happened to the north
mail nine years before.

I never told my wife the fearful events which
I have just related to you. I told the surgeon
who attended me; but he treated the whole
adventure as a mere dream born of the fever in
my brain. We discussed the question over and
over again, until we found that we could discuss
it with temper no longer, and then we dropped
it. Others may form what conclusions they please
—I know that twenty years ago I was the fourth
inside passenger in that Phantom Coach.

VI.

ANOTHER PAST LODGER RELATES
CERTAIN PASSAGES TO HER HUSBAND.
[INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY MAJOR JACKMAN.

The country clergyman and his quiet and better
than pretty wife, who occupied my respected
friend's second floor for two spring months of
four successive years, were objects of great
interest, both with my respected friend and with me.
One evening we took tea with them, and
happened to speak of a pretty wilful-looking young
creature and her husband—friends of theirs—
who had dined with them on the previous day.