To the Editor of the "Norra-Ouina Day News,"
Sin,—While the time for the telling of ghost-stories is upon us, I should like to ask if any of your readers have heard any variation of the following weird tale which the Chinese relate of more than one locality, and for which there must be some explanatory substratum of truth, Scene: A low mud-walled Chinese country inn, somewhere west of Ichang, in a secluded valley among bare stony hills. Here arrive one evening a party of coolies, tired, dusty, and noisy, travelling together for company, on their way to seek work in Hankow. Numerous bowls of rice and tea having been negotiated, the guests in their turn are at length disposed of for the night, and peace reigns again over the darkness, Early next morning they have shouldered their bundles and are off again; and who notices that the motley crowd contains one Jess than the day before, while something lies there motionless in that dark room in the house!
Mine host sits refilling his bubbly pipe, grumbling over the smallness of his late lodgers' cash; and then goes to weed his plot of vegetables till evening, when he is surprised to sce another visitor at his lonely door.
This is a reputable-looking mau, a silk merchant from Wuchang, who with his ser-ants and coolies is on his way west to Szechuan. Polite salutations, tea, much talk, more tea, and all details of family history are interchanged with the water-pipe; and when at last the merchant's "cook" or chief servant—the last to retire—asks for a sleeping-place, the innkeeper Inconically protrudes his lips with a slight elevation of the chin, to indicate @ small room hard by. As is not unusual in Chinese inns, there is already someone sleeping curled up in his bedding on the floor, and the tired servant is not long before he joins
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.