to be sent out to find him. All this story was carefully
narrated to us, with the details of names, dates,
&c., and the actual precipice pointed out.
But apart from the story of the havildar, my own
syce, a hillman who attends my pony, has actually
seen two ghosts, with one of whom he held a long conversation.
He was then serving in the plains at Saugor,
and coming back between twelve and one at night to
the mess he met another syce calling loudly for his
father. The ghost said he was the son, and had come
from Satara in the Bombay presidency to find his
father, and could not find him. My syce told him
that he had not seen him, and bade the ghost to keep
quiet or else he would have him locked up as a bad
character. The ghost then departed, wailing for his
father, and my syce went to the watchman and reported
the matter, saying there was a suspicious character
hanging round the mess. He was told in reply that
what he had seen was a ghost, which had often been
encountered, the facts being that the father had been
ill with plague and his son had been sent for from
Satara. On his arrival the son found the father dead,
and died himself from plague two days-later, and ever
since then had haunted the place as a spectre.
This syce drove the lesson home one day when we
were passing a Mahomedan cemetery half a mile outside
Almora town, where there fives a famous ghost of a
Mahomedan, and so terrible is this spectre that death
is the reward of him to whom he shows himself. As
we passed by I noticed a fresh corpse by the cemetery
bound ready for cremation at the Hindu burning ghat,
and saw the syce stop and question the bearers. He
informed me that, the evening before, two Hindus,
father and son, returning from Almora town, had been