In my travels I have met many very extraordinary and remarkable people with hobbies and fads of various kinds, but I never met a man of such curious personality as this old friend of mine, Captain Chester. All his methods and ideas were purely original. Everyone has some hobby; his hobby was ghost and spook-hunting.

We were sitting one lovely September evening in the gardens of one of the hotels at Bonn, which stretched down to the river Rhine, listening to the band and watching the great rafts coming down the river from the Black Forest.

“By Jove, sir,” said the old man, “I have shot big game in the Rockies, and hunted tigers and all that sort of thing; but, zooks! sir, I prefer hunting ghosts any day. That Robert de Montrose was the first I saw. There are shoals of these shades about, a perfect army of them everywhere, especially in St Andrews. Gad, sir, you should hear the banshees shrieking at night in the Irish bogs. I don’t believe in your infernal sea serpents, but I’ve seen water kelpies in the Scottish and American lakes.”

I told him I had never heard a banshee or seen a water kelpie.

“Very likely, sir, very probable. Everyone can’t see and hear these things. I can.”

I told him I had never seen a disembodied spirit, and didn’t want to.

“Gad, zooks! sir, I consider disinspirited bodies far worse. They are quite common. I allude to human bodies that have lost their spirits or souls, and yet go about among us. Zounds! sir, my cousin is one of them.

“Ah,” he continued, “detached personality is a curious[40] thing. I can detach my personality, can you?”

“Most certainly not,” I said, “what the deuce do you mean?”

“Mean,” he said, “I mean my spirit can float out of my body at will. My spirit becomes a sort of mental balloon. I can then defy destiny.”

“How in thunder do you manage to do it anyway?”

“By practice, sir, of course. When my spirit floats out of my body, I can see my own old body sitting in my armchair and an ugly old wreck of a body it is. It is bad for one, I admit; it is very weakening. Another thing may happen; another wandering spirit may suddenly take possession of one’s body, and then one’s own spirit can’t get back again, and it becomes a wandering spirit, and is always trying to force itself into other people’s bodies. Then one’s spirit gets into a mental bunker, you see.”

“I don’t see a bit. It is most unpleasant. Tell me about ghosts you have seen, and about that dagger you gave Major Montrose.”

“Oh! so then you are not interested in eliminated personality?”

“Not a bit,” I said, “I don’t know what it is. Tell me about that dagger for a change.”

“Oh! ah! Well, the dagger Robert of Montrose gave me proved of great use to my old friend, Bob Montrose, on many occasions. It had a wonderful power of its own. Once he got into a broil with a lot of Spanish fellows one night, and as he was unarmed at the time he was in a remarkably tight corner. Suddenly something slipped into his hand, and, by Jove, sir, it was the dagger, and that dagger saved his life. Another time he found himself in an American train with a raving lunatic, and if it had not been for the protecting dagger he’d have been torn limb from limb. After that he took it everywhere with him.”

“Where is it now?”

“Well, there’s an odd thing if you like. Bob died in the Isle of France, where Paul and Virginia used to be. He was killed by a fall, and is buried there. He left the dagger to me in[41] his will, but no human eyes have ever seen that dagger since his death. It may have been stolen, or it may have gone back to where it came from into Robert of Montrose’s stone kist in the old Chapter-House at St Andrews Cathedral. Probably its usefulness was at an end, and it was needed no more. Bob told me one queer thing about that dagger. Once a year near Christmastide (the dagger hung on the wall of his bedroom) it used to exude a thick reddish fluid like blood, which used to cover the blade in large drops, and it remained so for several hours—and, again, sometimes at night it used to shine with a bright light of its own.”

“That is indeed wonderful,” I said, lighting another cheroot, “but tell me more about the St Andrews bogles. Astral bodies, dual personality, and things of that kind depress me a bit.”

“Well,............