“When shall we manifest ourselves?” said George the Fifth.

“I question if it is at all desirable to manifest ourselves,” said Mackenzie King. “There are a great many young scientists living in this college, and it would be discourteous—nay, wantonly cruel—to do anything that would tamper with their simple faith in materialism.”

“Oh, come on,” said the senior monarch. “Let’s do the thing properly. I hate all this invisible hooting and rattling windows and so forth. That is for the lower order of ghosts. Be a sport, man; everybody knows you were a keen spiritualist. We’ll manifest ourselves.”

“Yes,” I assented, eagerly; “if you would consent to walk around the quadrangle at midnight, for instance—”

“Capital!” said the old King. “We’ll walk ahead, Bertie, arm-in-arm, and the P.M. can follow us, three paces in the rear. How’s that?”

Mr. King looked sour. “We shall see,” said he. “Let us leave it at this: manifestation if necessary, but not necessarily manifestation.”

“Oh, it will be necessary,” said George the Fifth. “When shall we come?” he asked, eagerly. I could see that his mind was on the stamp.

“Would January the sixth be agreeable to your Majesties?” said I. It was clear by now that Mr. King did not count. The collectors were only too ready to cooperate.

“You may depend upon us,” said the old King. “Now Bertie, we must go, or we shall be late for the haunted chart-room at Greenwich.” And as he began to fade before my eyes, he drew from some inner recess of his uniform a handsome and completely real cigar and pressed it upon me.

A few minutes later I was strolling about the quad, smoking that admirable Hoyo de Monterey, as contented as any man in Canada, I suppose. For I had managed something for the College which I do not think had been apparent to my distinguished guests. Why should they know what I knew—two men educated as Naval officers, and a statesman of Presbyterian background and spiritualist leanings? But I knew that by far the most appropriate day for their manifestation was January the sixth, which, is, of course, the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and the Feast of the Three Kings.

The range of guests who come to our fortnightly High Table dinners is wide, and provides us with extraordinarily good company. Sometimes we get a surprise—an economist who turns out to be a poet, for instance. (I mean a poet in the formal sense: all economists are rapt, fanciful creatures; it is necessary to their profession.) Only last Friday we had a visitor whom I found a most delightful and illuminating companion. I shall not tell you what his profession is, or you will immediately identify him, and I shall have betrayed his secret, which is that he is a medium.

He does not like being a medium. He finds it embarrassing. But the gift, like being double-jointed or having the power to wiggle one’s ears, can neither be acquired by study nor abdicated by an act of will. His particular power lies in the realm of psychometry; that is to say that sometimes—not always—he finds that when he is near to an object that has strong and remarkable associations, he becomes aware of those associations with an intensity that is troublesome to him. And occasionally psychic manifestations follow.

He confided this to me just as we were leaving the small upstairs dining-room, where we assemble after dinner for conversation and a reasonable consumption of port and Madeira. We were standing at the end of the room by the sideboard, for he had been looking at our College grant-of-arms; he put his hand on the wall to the left of the frame, to enable him to lean forward for a closer look, and then he turned to me, rather white around the mouth, I thought, and said—

“Let’s go downstairs. It’s terribly close in here.”

I thought it was the cigar smoke that was troubling him. Excellent as the Bursar’s cigars undoubtedly are, the combustion of a couple of dozen of them within an hour does make the air rather heavy. So I went downstairs with him, and thought no more about the matter.

It must have been a couple of hours later that I was taking a turn around the quad for a breath of air before bed, when I saw something I did not like. The window of the small dining room was lighted up, but not by electricity. It was a low, flickering light that seemed to rise and fall in its intensity, and I thought at once of fire. I dashed up the stairs with a burst of speed that any of the Junior Fellows might envy, and opened the door. Sure enough, there was light in the room.

But—! Now you must understand that we had left the room in the usual sort of disorder; the table had been covered with the debris of our frugal academic pleasures—nutshells, the parings of fruit, soiled wine-glasses, filled ashtrays, crumpled napkins, and all that sort of thing. But now—!

I have never seen the room looking as it looked at that moment. How shall I describe it?

To begin, the table was covered with a cloth of that refulgent bluey-whiteness that speaks of the finest linen. And, what is more, there was not a crease in it; obviously it had been ironed on the table. The pattern that was woven into it was of maple leaves, entwined with lilies and roses. At every place—and it was set for twenty-four—was a napkin folded into the intricate shape known to Victorian butlers as Crown Imperial. At either end of the table was a soup tureen, and my heightened senses immediately discerned that the eastern tureen contained Mock Turtle, while that at the western end was filled with a Consommé enriched with a julienne of truffles—that is to say, Consommé Britannia. A noble boiled salmon of the Restigouche variety was displayed on one platter, with a vessel of Lobster Sauce in waiting, and on another was a selection of Fillets of the most splendid Nova Scotia mackerel, each gleaming with the pearls of a Sauce Maitre d’Hotel.

And the Entrees! Petites Bouches a la Reine, and Grenadine de Veau with a Pique Sauce Tomate—and none of your nasty bottled tomato sauce, either, but the genuine fresh article. There was a Lapin Sauté which had been made to stand upright, its paws raised as though in delight at its own beauty, and a charming fluff of cauliflower sprigs where its tail had been a few hours before; you could see that it was served au Champignons, for two button mushrooms gleamed where its eyes had once been. There was a Côtellete d’Agneau with, naturally, Petits Pois. There was a Coquette de Volaille, and a Timbale de Macaroni which had been moulded into the form of—of all things—a Beaver.

In addition there were roasted turkeys, chickens, a saddle of mutton and a sirloin of beef, and there were boiled turkeys, hams, corned beef and mutton cutlets. And it was all piping hot.

The flickering soft light I had seen through the window came from a gasolier that hung over the table, and through its alabaster globes gleamed the gaslight—surely one of the loveliest forms of illumination ever devised by man.

You have recognized the meal, of course. Every gourmet has that menu by heart. It was the Grand Banquet in Honour of the Colonial Delegates which was held at the Halifax Hotel in Charlottetown on September 12, 1864. This was the authentic food of Confederation. A specimen of the menu, elegantly printed on silk, and the gift of Professor Maurice Careless, one of our Senior Fellows, hangs on the wall of our small dining-room, just at the point where our guest, the medium, had laid his hand.

Nor was this all. What I have described to you at some length leapt to my eye in an instant, and my gaze had turned to the sideboard, which was laden with bottles of wine.

And what bottles! Tears came into my eyes, just to look at them. For these were not our ugly modern bottles, with their disagreeable Government stickers adhering to them, and their high shoulders, and their uniformity of shape, and their self-righteous airs, as though in the half-literate, nasal drone of politicians, they were declaiming: “We are the support of paved roads, general education and public health; we are the pillars of society.” No, no; these were smaller bottles, in a multiplicity of shapes and colours. There were the slim pale-green maidens of hock; the darkly opalescent romantic ports; the sturdily gay clarets and the high-nosed aristocrats of Burgundy; there were champagnes that almost danced, yet were not gassy impostors; and they were all bottles of the old shapes and the old colours—dark, merry and wicked.