“I am?” said I. “Is that good?”

“Oh, very good,” said Asmodeus. “Jolly good, I should say. You see, he reckoned your horoscope from the instant of your birth. Good enough, so far as it goes. But the horoscopes of the Children of the Double Sign—to which special group it would be clear to a more experienced astrologer that you belong—must be reckoned from the instant of the Second Birth, which is to say, from the hour of your Baptism. And that is quite a different pair of pyjamas. By your true horoscope, you appear as a man powerfully under the protection of Mercurius, which brings you good fortune and a deliverance from all adversity. After a while, that’s to say. You always have quite a spell of adversity first.”

“So what do you see in store for me?” said I.

“You will shortly be working with a new Hall Don,” said he. “A delightful fellow, a committed Conservative, the soul of reason, and extremely clean in his personal habits.”

He smiled, as if he had given me a great gift. But I had another point to make. “I don’t imagine that the Benevolent Mercurius will allow you to throw me down from this tower,” I said, and looked him right in the eye.

He looked back, just as steadily. “No, that is so,” he said, “but I am not obliged to fly you down to earth, either. Good-bye!”

“Wait,” I cried; “where are you going?”

“Oh, now that I am free once again,” said Asmodeus, “I shall raise hell in the Law School, instead of being the exclusive slave of your Hall Don.” And he rose lightly from my lap, and with his two little crutches tucked under his robe, he flew off into the night, in the direction of the Law School.

By exertions which I still groan to think of, I got down from my stone chair, and—oh, vertigo!—reached the ladder that is fixed on the inside of our tower. It is not a descent I recommend to anyone, amid the rigours of a winter night. But at last, weary and trembling, I stood on firm ground again.

And before I went to my bed, I crept once more up to the room of the Hall Don who now, I foresaw, would be compelled to retire, and removed the bottle. For Asmodeus was a self-confident little devil and he may return. And when he does, I have the bottle, and I know the magic word; Asmodeus would be the ideal collaborator on my next book—University Administration as a Preparation for Hell.

Massey College is troubled with ghosts, much as lesser fabrics are troubled with mice; the most resolute determination is powerless to keep them away. Until this year, however, I have congratulated myself that they have kept clear of the part of the College that is reserved for the private quarters of myself and my family. Only once, many years ago, did a ghost tap at my bedroom door, and when I answered he quickly led me into the College proper. But of course a time had to come when I would find a ghost in the Lodgings. Anyone could have foreseen it.

It has always been my desire to keep my private life and my college life apart. If the ghost that visited me in the Master’s Lodging had been a personal spectre, I would not trouble you about the matter now. But he had an undoubted relationship with the College as a whole; indeed it might be said that he was, at least in origin, a source of pride to the College. Two apparently unconnected happenings brought him here. The first was the publication, during the year past, of Colonel Stacey’s book A Very Double Life, about some aspects of the personal character of the late William Lyon Mackenzie King; it was a significant book, deservedly successful with the public, and I recall with what pleasure we toasted it, and its author, at High Table, where we always celebrate the achievements of members of our community. The other fact was that one of my daughters moved to Hamilton, and bought a house there.

How could two such unrelated happenings work together to produce a result in Massey College? Those of you who have had experience of the occult world know that there is no chance assembly of facts that may not rouse an echo in the world of spirits. It happened like this: another of my daughters, who lives in Ottawa, wanted to send her sister a gift for her new home; she brought it to Toronto and left it with my wife and myself to be collected by the Hamilton daughter at some convenient time. It was a charming gift, a small table of the kind that antique dealers call an “occasional table”, an antique of attested Canadian craftsmanship. It was as a piece of Canadiana that its quality as a gift was raised above the commonplace; in every other respect it was just a nice little table.

“Where did it come from?” I asked my daughter.

“Oh, it has what the antique dealer called provenance,” she replied; “it came from the house of an Ottawa lady named Mrs. Patteson, who was quite well known in her time as a collector of unusual things, and unusual people.”

The name meant nothing to me. We put the table in a room in our basement, to wait until it was picked up. And for a number of reasons, that was not speedily.

This was in the early autumn, and until November the table remained where it had been put. It was on the night of November the first—All Souls’ Eve, as you will immediately have recognized—that I heard an unusual sound just after I had gone to bed; unusual because it was faint, but persistent. Loud sounds are not unknown in this neighbourhood during the night. Sounds attaining to the state of uproar may be heard, as students from the neighbouring colleges and residences rage through the streets, uttering cries which mount to the level of the Primal Scream. But this sound suggested a low but persistent tapping, as though someone were knocking; not the kind of knocking that one associates with academic communities—the tireless knocking of reputations and institutions—but a light hammering. I strove to ignore it, but at last I rose and put on slippers and dressing-gown, and set out in search.

It was clear as soon as I left my bedroom that the sound was inside my own house, and my ear directed me to the cellar, to the door of a room not much used, where the Ottawa table was stored. I opened the door slowly, and to my astonishment the room was suffused with a soft light—a mauve light—strongest in an open space in which stood the Little Table, and—wondrous in the telling—the Little Table seemed to be dancing a jig.

Far be it from me to pretend that I am a man of unusual courage, but in my own house I suffer no nonsense from anything, animate or inanimate. I put my hand on the Table and I forced it to stand still. But when I took my hand away something happened that shattered my self-possession: the table moved toward me and began to rub itself against me in a manner that suggested a dog, but a dog with a more than dog-like intelligence. The table was fondling me.

I am sure that many of you are acquainted with the book on Canadian furniture written by the great expert on that subject, Scott Symons; in it he asserts that Canadian furniture, at its finest, has a sensuous quality that can be, in certain instances, positively erotic. He says—and I have no reason to doubt his word—that on one occasion, during a meal, a dining table caressed his knee. Ghosts I can cope with, but erotic furniture destroys my self-possession; I rushed out of the room and upstairs, where my wife was still reading.

“You are pale,” said she; “you look as if you had seen a ghost.”

“Not this time,” I replied; “it’s that table downstairs. It tried to get fresh with me. I think I need a drink.”

An ordinary woman might have laughed, or offered to get the drink, or perhaps some aspirin. But my wife is not an ordinary woman. She rose at once, tucked the book she was reading under her arm, and led the way back to the mysterious chamber.