I never met a better fellow in the world than my old friend, Allan Beauchamp. He had been educated at Eton, and Magdalen at Oxford, after which he joined a crack regiment, and later on took it into his head to turn doctor. He was a great traveller and a magnificent athlete. There was no game in which he did not excel. Curiously enough, he hated music; he had no ear for it, and he did not know the difference between the airs of “Tommy, make room for your uncle” and “The Lost Chord.” He was tremendously proud of his pedigree; he had descended from the de Beauchamps, and one of his ancestors, he gravely informed people, had helped Noah to get the wasps and elephants into the Ark. Another of them seems to have been not very far away in the Garden of Eden. In fact, they seem to have been quite prehistoric. He was quite cracked on the subject of brain transference, telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts, warnings, and the like, and on these points he was most uncanny and fearsome. The literature he had about them was blood curdling. He believed in dual personality, and in visions, horoscopes, and dreams. He showed me a pamphlet he had written, entitled “The Toad-faced Demon of Lone Devil’s Dyke.” He was always flitting about Britain exploring haunted houses and castles, and sleeping in haunted rooms when it was possible. Some years ago Beauchamp and myself, accompanied by his faithful valet, rejoicing in the name of Pellingham Truffles, went to the Highlands for a bit of quiet and rest, and it was there I heard his curious story of the skull.

We were sitting over a cosy fire after dinner. It was snowing hard outside, and very cold. Our pipes were alight[45] and our grog on the table, when Allan Beauchamp suddenly remarked—“It’s a deuced curious thing for a man to be always followed about the place by a confounded grinning skull.”

“Eh, what,” I said, “who the deuce is being followed about by a skull? It’s rubbish, and quite impossible.”

“Not a bit,” said my friend, “I’ve had a skull after me more or less for several years.”

“It sounds like a remark a lunatic would make,” I rejoined rather crossly. “Do not talk bunkum. You’ll go dotty if you believe such infernal rot.”

“It is not bunkum or rot a bit,” said Allan, “It’s gospel truth. Ask Truffles, ask Jack Weston, or Jimmy Darkgood, or any of my south country pals.”

“I don’t know Jack Weston or Jimmy Darkgood,” I said, “but tell me the whole story, and some day, if it’s good, I’ll put it in the St Andrews Citizen.”

“It’s mostly about St Andrews,” said Beauchamp, “so here goes, but shove on some coals first.”

I did so, and then requested him to fire away.

“It was long, long ago, I think about the year 1513, that one of my ancestors, a man called Neville de Beauchamp, resided in Scotland. It seems he was an uncommonly wild dog, went in for racing and cards, and could take his wine and ale with any of them even in those hard-drinking days. He was known as Flash Neville. Later on he married a pretty girl, the daughter of a silk mercer in Perth, who, it seems, died (they said of a broken heart) two years after. Neville de Beauchamp was seized with awful remorse, and became shortly after a monk in Greyfriars Monastery at St Andrews. After Neville’s wife’s death, her relations seem to have been on the hunt after him, burning for revenge, and the girl’s brother, a rough, wild dog in those stormy days, at last managed to track his quarry down in the monastery at St Andrews.”

“Very interesting,” I said, “that monastery stood very nearly on the site of the present infant school, and we found the well in 1880. Well, what did this brother do, eh?”

“It seems that one afternoon after vespers he forced his way into the Monastery Chapel, sought out Neville de Beauchamp,[46] and slashed off his head with a sword in the aisle of the Kirk. Now a queer thing happened—his body fell on the floor, but the severed head, with a wild scream, flew up to the chapel ceiling and vanished through its roof.”

“Mighty queer that,” I said.

“The body was reverently buried,” went on Allan, “but the head never was recovered, and, whirling through the air over the monastery, screaming and groaning most pitifully, it used to cause great terror to the monks and others o’ nights. It was a well-known story, and few cared to venture in that locality after nightfall. The head soon became a skull, and since that time has alway............