I was always a book-hunter. One winter day I entered a small book shop in an obscure neighbourhood. It was growing dark, and the owner of the shop was chiefly a voice, until suddenly a brilliant jet of gas showed me a little sallow man, bright-eyed, on a background of sombre book shelves. He informed me that he was busy packing as he was leaving the premises.

      "You want a larger place, I suppose?" I said.

      "Well, no, sir; the place is big enough, and it's been a lucky spot to me for many years, and I'm sorry to leave it."

      He looked so regretful that I felt I ought to express a sympathetic curiosity as to the reasons for his flitting.

      "The fact is, sir," he answered to my polite expressions, "I don't mind telling you, though it sounds silly, since last Christmas or thereabouts this shop has been haunted."

      "By what?" I exclaimed in amused astonishment.

      "Well, sir, he's a very respectable-looking party that ghost is, quite a figure for a book shop, but I don't like him prying about in the small hours of the night; makes me feel creepy, so that I've got sort of sick over it all and I've made up my mind to leave him in possession."

      He looked so little like the hero of such an experience that I laughed.

      "You may laugh, sir," he said, "but when you have had your laugh I will say it again. This shop is haunted for more than a year past. I don't mind who knows it now that I am leaving. It's the landlord's business to look to it."

      "Charge the ghost a heavy rent and set the bailiffs on him if he will not pay. That is what your landlord will have to do," I said.

      "Ah, sir, you can enjoy your little joke and go home and sleep sound, you can, not afraid to be wakened all a-creep by something you can't put your hands on. It's no use firing a shot or calling the police to take a burglar who can go through the wall while you're looking at him."

      "Does he burgle much?"

      "I can't say that I've missed anything after he has been."

      "Perhaps he only wants to read the books."

      "He'll have to do without reading them after this week," said the little man briskly. I made a small purchase and promised to visit him some weeks later in his new establishment.

      About a month elapsed before I fulfilled my promise, and when I went in search of my bewildered bookseller in the premises to which he had migrated I found the place still in the disorder following a flitting, the little man seated disconsolately on an unopened packing case. A few shelves only had been filled with the transported books and the rest stood empty.

      When I spoke to him he looked at me despondently and shook his head.

      "What is wrong now?" I asked.

      "It's all wrong," he said in a low frightened voice, "he's followed me!"

      Then I felt quite sure that the little man was losing his wits. I tried reasoning, then ridicule. Nothing moved him.

      "What am I to do?" he asked despairingly. "If I sell up and go to Australia that thing will still follow me."

      To change the subject I mounted a ladder and began to study the backs of the volumes which had been ranged on the new shelves before his courage had failed him.

      "Now, here is a book which interests me," I said, and I took it down. I examined it carefully and found it a quite unique copy of a very ancient work; in fact, it was a rare prize, a treasure to a collector. It was worth a considerable sum of money which I felt willing to pay for it.

      Having explained my views to my disheartened little friend I found him cheered by the surprise of so excellent a sale. I took possession of the precious volume and quitted the shop with it.

      I am the owner of rather a noted collection which is nicely housed within my library, and here I placed my newly-acquired treasure in an honoured niche, having first spent an evening in exploring its contents. "A lucky adventure," I reflected as I stood back to observe how its shabby nobility of outward aspect was distinguished among the finer bindings of less kingly volumes.

      Then I went to bed. It is my fancy to have my bedroom close to my library. I was roused from my first sleep suddenly by - I knew not what. I lay listening, hearing nothing yet convinced that some unusual sound had broken my slumber. After waiting for a time which seemed long I was falling asleep again when a sudden noise made me jump, a heavy thud like the sound of a large book falling on the floor of the adjoining library. The first thought occurring to me was that I had replaced some volume carelessly and awkwardly on its shelf, from which it had dropped. To satisfy myself on the point I got up, struck alight, and went into the library. No one was there, nothing was disturbed; evidently no book had fallen from its shelf. Yet the noise I had heard was certainly like the sound of a book that falls. No doubt there was an explanation of the occurrence if one could only guess it. I returned to bed and happily was soon fast asleep.

      Next morning the impression on my mind of what had occurred in the night was a very slight one. I thought of my little bookseller and smiled. "Such trifles," I reflected, "are the origin of the scares of the ignorant. Some small natural cause, a great deal of imagination run mad, and you have the phenomenon."

      After that I was absent from home for some little time. The night following my return I was awakened suddenly in precisely the same manner as on the former occasion feeling sure that some unusual disturbance had aroused me. I looked at my watch and found that it was the mysterious hour of all the dark ones, three o'clock in the morning, an hour at which the day-sunned earth is at the extreme point of chill, an hour at which sick men die. I was aware, with a little thrill, that it was the very same moment of the night as that at which I had some weeks before wakened to hear the sound of a heavy book falling in the library. More full of curiosity than on the last occasion I proceeded, candle in hand, to the library door. It stood open, and something impelled me to extinguish my light. Having done so I perceived that there was a faint glimmer within the apartment which I was about to enter. With a strange sense of expectation I pushed open the door.

      The light seemed to come from a figure which was standing with its back to me, an arm uplifted, the hand on a book on the shelf above its head. The light was not strong, but one by which it might be possible to read. Recalling it afterwards, I thought of the light of St. Columba's left hand by which he was able to write his famous copy of the Gospel. I thought I had made no noise, but as my foot crossed the threshold the figure turned its head, looked at me, and vanished.

      I touched a button at the door and the electric light filled the place. I searched in every corner of the library, afterwards summoned a man servant, with whose assistance I examined all the rooms in the house. Nothing, however, came of our efforts to account for the extraordinary occurrence.

      My servant, who was a lively fellow, began to tell me of how he once thought he was threatened by an assassin, and found that it was his own shadow projected by a light behind him. I allowed him to think me the victim of hallucination, and as before returned to bed, but not to sleep. The vision had been exceedingly vivid and had left a mark which could not be easily rubbed out of the memory.

      After that I made a practice of reading in bed until the mystic hour of three had passed, and kept the doors of my bedroom and the library opened wide. Some time elapsed and nothing startling happened. I began to fail from my vigilance and to fall asleep before the exciting moment expected had arrived. When my extraordinary experience occurred to my mind I found myself reasoning on the unconscious action of the brain as in dreams, and wondering how far my dwelling on the terrors of the little man in the shop had operated in creating the apparition which had so strangely seemed presented to me by my ordinary visual perception.

      One evening when I had arrived at this point of reasoning and the strain of expectation had been quite slackened I was sitting in my library, reading by the electric light which illuminated the apartment with its usual brilliance. Suddenly glancing up from my book I saw a man sitting opposite to me. I had not heard anyone coming in, the door was shut, and the last time I had been conscious of looking around me I had certainly been alone. I gazed at the person who was thus unaccountably bearing me company. He was a large, sallow-browed, thoughtful-looking man, apparently about sixty years of age, dressed in the clothes that men wore a hundred years ago, high-collared coat, white neckcloth, with hair and whiskers cut according to the fashion of that day. There was nothing visionary about his appearance; he was bending over his book, absorbed in it, as I was absorbed in mine, and, preoccupied as I had so lately been with the mystic, it did not cross my mind at the moment that the intruder on my privacy was not of ordinary flesh and blood. While I observed him fixedly, however, he raised his head, and a pair of strange eyes full of a weird expression fastened themselves on mine. I also saw a wavering movement about the different parts of his body unlike anything I had ever seen before except in a cloud that has taken some extraordinary form but threatens to break up and reshape itself. The eyes expressed an earnest sense of need, an appeal of some kind — the lips moved as if they would speak but could not. While I returned the look, held by an indescribable fascination, I grew aware that this was a being not subject to the same conditions as myself. My impulse was to touch him to make sure of his actual existence before I responded to his seeming, before I answered the appeal in his eyes by an uttered question.

      I rose in my seat and made a step to cross to his side of the table intending to put my hands upon his shoulders and satisfy myself as to the material of the being with whom I was about to hold communication. In making this movement I removed my eyes from his. When I directed them again towards the place where he had been sitting there was no one to be seen; the intruder had vanished.

      I confess I felt a shock unlike anything I had ever experienced before and a regret that I had not responded to the appeal which those eerie and urgent eyes had made to me. It was evident that my opportunity was passed. He or his permissors could not wait on the dilatoriness of my intention.

      I went to the spot where I had seen him sitting. The book in which he had appeared absorbed lay open on the table. It was the book that I had bought from the haunted bookseller. It was not I, certainly, who had taken it from its niche on my shelves and spread it open on the table as now I found it.

      This amazing incident troubled me more with regret than apprehension. I was pursued by the urgent appeal in the eyes of one who was a fellow being, even though moving on an altogether different plane and subject to quite other laws and limitations. Across the bridge that separated us he had looked to me for help, and I had failed him.

      I kept hoping for another chance, but nothing happened until one evening when again reading in my library I was startled by words conveyed to me not by the sound of a voice but rather as if a breeze had wafted them across my brain with the emphasis and suggested meaning of a message making an appointment.

      "At the Criterion to-morrow at two o'clock" was the wording of this silent telegram.

      I repeated the words aloud, looking at the place where my mysterious visitor had sat, then at the shelf where the book so strangely connected with him reposed in its place. Nothing answered me, and the sound of my own voice thus speaking made me seem to myself for a moment as though doubtful of my own sanity. That feeling passed, however, before the return wave of an intensity of conviction.

      "The Criterion at two o'clock must mean the restaurant," I reflected, and I resolved to seize and follow the fantastic clue which my imagination or something else had put into my hand. Accordingly the next day at the suggested hour I walked into the place appointed and looked around me. I selected a table, sat down, and ordered lunch. Half smiling at my own mood and movements I admitted to myself that I expected nothing unusual to happen. I would, however, wait an hour on the possible or impossible, after which I would feel that I had indulged my fancy quite sufficiently and would go on my way.

      While I studied the menu card a young man walked up to the table, glanced at me, and sat down opposite to me. Something about him struck me as familiar though I was sure that I had never seen him before. He was a large young man with a sallow, thoughtful face and penetrating dark eyes which he turned on me occasionally while we both waited to be served with luncheon. After a few minutes we entered into conversation. As my companion made some remarks with regard to the place we were in, as to comfort and convenience, I was led to say that I had not had much experience of its capabilities, in fact that I should not have been there at that moment but for very odd circumstances, an admission which I followed up by asking whether he believed in mysterious or supernatural intimations or occurrences. He looked at me straight with his peculiar eyes and said, "It is a subject which is occupying me much at present, though you would say that, as a lawyer, I am one of the last persons to be affected by such problems."

      "Perhaps they are forced on most of us at times," I said. "May I ask what is the particular phase which is before you at present?"

      He paused thoughtfully for a moment and then said, "The question is how far dreams are the mere product of our own brains which are so active that they keep weaving up odds and ends into romances and designs, reflecting life even while we are asleep."

      "I can nearly always trace a dream to its foundations, which I usually find of the slightest character" was my answer. "The solid material which our minds have worked on are left to be worked out in our waking moments, the dream-making faculty snatches at straws and stray threads of colour and makes a wondrous web, which is after all only a cobweb gossamer, light and unsubstantial as the air of heaven."

      My companion peeled an orange with a slight look of dissent.

      "I agree with you in the main," he said presently, "but there are dreams and dreams."

      "Will you give me some of your experiences?" I asked.

      "Willingly. For some time past I have persistently dreamed the same dream, night after night, and always accompanied by the same thought. "I have dreamed repeatedly that this thing happened, but now it is actually happening." I wake and smile and dismiss the thing from my memory, but its unfailing return with increased illusion of reality begins to tell on me."

      "Have you any objection to describe the dream?"

      "None. A dream is a dream, and no evidence. A man stands by my bed who assures me that he is my great-grandfather. I have no portrait of my great-grandfather, but a certain likeness to my own face and figure seems to assure me, in the dream at least, that he speaks the truth. He informs me that shortly before his leaving this life he yielded to the temptation of poverty and acquired a guilt which now withholds him from the enjoyment of perfect peace. He seeks means of making reparation. The laws and conditions of a different state of existence prevent his now doing what I can do in his place to make reparation."

      "Did he make known to you the nature of the unfortunate act?"

      "Yes; not the taking of life or moral ruin of another, but the purloining from an important library to which he had access of a rare book, the property of a nobleman."

      As the young man spoke he leaned forward and fixed his eyes on mine; and instantly I seemed to see the mysterious student sitting opposite to me at my library table. The two figures and faces seemed one and the same, allowing for the difference of age.

      "Good God!" I ejaculated.

      "What do you mean? You don't suppose I really believe that my ancestor was a thief?"

      "No," I said, "but the occurrence is strange. I may tell you that it was owing to a mysterious intimation that I came here today and chanced to meet you."

      "Let me request an equivalent for my confidence."

      I related to him the whole of my late extraordinary experience, after which he came with me to my house and together we examined the book. I need only add that we afterwards traced the devious path of the volume back to its proper home, one of the most famous private libraries in Europe. The book had been missing for a hundred years, having disappeared no one knew how. The book-plate had been removed, and though the volume had been sold over and over again it had never been identified as the property of its rightful owner.

      With the restoration of the book to its old place in a venerable apartment of one of the most stately mansions of England my story ends. The man who met me "at two o'clock at the Criterion" remains my friend, and neither we nor my little bookseller have since then been troubled by the communications of an unquiet spirit.

(THE END)