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(Thunderclap)
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(Chimes)
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(Howling wind)
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(Thunderclap)
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Two men in a smoking room were
talking of their private school days.
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'At our school,' said one, 'we had
a ghost's footmark on the staircase.'
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'What was it like?'
'Oh, very unconvincing.
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Just the shape of a shoe
with a square toe, if I remember right.
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I never heard any story
about the thing, which seems odd.
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Why didn't someone invent one,
I wonder?'
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'You can never tell with boys,'
said the other,
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'they have a mythology of their own.'
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'I imagine if you were to investigate
the cycle of ghost stories
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which boys tell each other,
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they'd all turn out to be highly compressed
versions of stories out of books.
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You never heard, did you,
of a real ghost at a private school?
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I thought not.
Nobody has that I ever came across.'
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'The way you said that,
I gathered that you have.'
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'I really don't know.
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But this is what was in my mind.
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It happened at my private school
thirty-odd years ago.
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I haven't any explanation of it.
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The school was near London.
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It was established
in a large and fairly old house,
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a great white building
with very fine grounds about it.
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There were large cedars in the garden
and some ancient elms
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in the three or four fields
which we used for our games.
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I came to the school in the September
soon after the year 1870.
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Among the boys who arrived
on the same day was one whom I took to,
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a Highland boy
whom I'll call McLeod.
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I got to know him very well.
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The school was a large one,
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so a considerable staff of masters
was required,
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and there were rather
frequent changes among them.
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One term,
perhaps it was my third or fourth,
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a new master made his appearance,
his name was Sampson.
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He was a tallish, stoutish, pale,
black-bearded man.
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I think we liked him.
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He'd travelled a good deal
and had stories which amused us
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on our school walks,
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I remember that he had a charm
on his watch chain
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that attracted my attention one day
and he let me examine it.
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It was a gold Byzantine coin,
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with an effigy of some emperor
on one side.
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The other side had been
worn practically smooth,
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and he had cut on it
his own initials, GWS,
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and a date, July 24th, 1865.
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Yes, I can see it now.
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He told me he'd picked it up
in Constantinople.
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Well, the first odd thing
that happened was this...
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Sampson was doing
Latin grammar with us.
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One of his favourite methods was
to make us construct sentences
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out of our own heads to illustrate
the rules he was trying to make us learn.
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On this occasion, he was telling us
how to express "remembering" in Latin.
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He ordered us each to make a sentence,
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bringing in the verb memini,
"I remember".
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Well, most of us made up
some ordinary sentence
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such as "I remember my father",
or something equally uninteresting.
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But the boy I mentioned, McLeod,
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was evidently thinking
of something much more elaborate
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because when I looked at his paper,
I saw he'd put down nothing at all
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and hardly seemed to be attending.
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We all wanted to get on to something else,
which did seem to have some effect,
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because he very quickly scribbled
a couple of lines on his paper
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and handed it in.
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The clock was striking twelve
before Sampson got to McLeod's paper,
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so he had to wait behind
to have the sentence corrected.
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I decided to wait for him,
but when at last he did arrive
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I guessed there must have been
some sort of trouble.
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"I think Sampson's rather sick with me,"
he said.
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"I put: memento putei
inter quatuor taxos.
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It was all right,
as far as I could see."
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"What does it mean?" I said.
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"That's the funny part, I don't know.
It just came into my head.
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I know what I think it means,
because just before I wrote it down
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I had a sort of picture of it in my head.
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I believe it means:
'Remember the well among the four...'
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Erm... Oh what are those dark trees
that have red berries on them?
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Yes, I know, yews.
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Anyway, when Sampson read it,
he got up
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and went to the mantelpiece
without saying anything.
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He stood there quite a long time
with his back to me,
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and then, without turning round,
he said:
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'What do you suppose that means?'
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I told him what I thought, only I couldn't
remember the name of the silly trees.
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Then he wanted to know
why I'd put it down.
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I had to say something or other...
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After that, he left off
talking about it and asked me
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how long I'd been at the school
and where I lived, things like that.
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Then I came away."
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The next day, McLeod took to his bed
with a chill or something,
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and it was more than a week
before he was back in school again.
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Then about a month later,
there was another incident.
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We were going through
those dismal things
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which people call
conditional sentences.
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We were told to make
a conditional sentence
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expressing a future consequence.
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We did it and showed
our bits of paper to Sampson
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who began to look through them.
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All at once, he got up, made some
odd sort of noise in his throat
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and rushed out by the door
which was just by his desk.
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We sat there for a minute.
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Then we went up to look at the papers
still lying there.
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The top one was written in red ink,
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which no one in the class ever used.
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We all looked at it,
including McLeod,
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and all took their dying oaths
that it wasn't theirs.
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Then I thought of counting
the bits of paper.
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There were seventeen on the desk,
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and sixteen boys in the form.
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I bagged the extra paper and kept it,
and I believe I still have it now.
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What was written on it
seemed harmless enough.
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'Si Iu non veneris ad me,
ego veniam ad 1e. '
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Which means, I suppose,
"If you don't come to me, I'll come to you."
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But there's another odd thing about it.
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That same afternoon,
I took it out of my locker.
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I know for certain it was the same bit
because I'd made a finger mark on it.
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And no single trace of writing
of any kind was there on it.
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Anyway, so much for that.
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After about half an hour,
Sampson looked in again.
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He said he'd felt unwell
and told us that we might go.
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That day was a half holiday and
next day Sampson was in school again.
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It was on that night that the third
and last incident in my story happened.
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We, McLeod and I, slept in a dormitory
at right angles to the main building.
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Sampson slept in the main building
on the first floor.
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There was a very bright full moon,
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and some time before two o'clock,
I was woken by someone shaking me.
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It was McLeod.
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"There's a burglar getting in
through Sampson's window."
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As soon as I could speak, I said,
"Why not wake everybody up?"
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"Because I'm not sure who it is,"
he said.
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"Don't make a row,
come and look!"
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I came and looked.
There was no one there.
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I was cross enough with McLeod,
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yet it seemed to me that
there was something wrong,
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something that made me very glad
I wasn't alone.
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"I didn't hear anything at all,"
he said,
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"but about five minutes
before I woke you,
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I found myself
looking out of this window here,
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and there was a man sitting or kneeling
on Sampson's windowsill and looking in,
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and I thought he was beckoning."
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"What son of man?"
McLeod wriggled, "I don't know!
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But he was beastly thin
and looked as if he was wet all over."
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He glanced round, then whispered,
"I'm not at all sure that he was alive."
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We went on talking in whispers
some time longer,
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and eventually crept back to bed.
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No one else in the room
woke or stirred the whole time.
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Next day, Mr Sampson was gone,
not to be found.
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And I believe no trace of him
has ever come to light since.
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In thinking it over,
one of the oddest things about it all
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seemed to me to be the fact
that neither McLeod nor I
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ever mentioned what we had seen
to any third person whatever.
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Of course, no questions were asked
on the subject,
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and if they had been,
I'm inclined to believe
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that we would not have been able
to make any answer.
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We seemed unable to speak about it.
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That is my story," said the narrator.'
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'The only approach to a ghost story
connected with the school that I know.
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But still, I think,
an approach to such a thing.'
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The sequel to this may perhaps
be reckoned highly conventional,
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but a sequel there is,
and so it must be produced.
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There had been more
than one listener to the story,
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and in the latter part
of that same year
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one such listener was staying
at a country house in Ireland.
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One evening, his host was turning
over a drawer full of odds and ends
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in the smoking room.
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Suddenly, he put his hand
upon a little box.
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'Now,' he said, 'you know about
old things. Tell me what that is.'
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My friend opened the little box
and found in it a thin gold chain
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with an object attached to it.
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He glanced at the object
and then took off his spectacles
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to examine it more narrowly.
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'What's the history of this?' he asked.
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'Odd enough,' was the answer,
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'you know the yew thicket
in the shrubbery?
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Well, a year or two back, we were
cleaning out the well that used to be there,
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and what do you suppose we found?'
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'ls it possible that you found a body?'
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said the visitor
with an odd feeling of nervousness.
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'We found two.'
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'Was this thing found with them?'
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'It was. Among the rags of the clothes
that were on one of the bodies.
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A bad business,
whatever the story of it may have been.
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One body had the arms
tight round the other.
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They must have been there
thirty years or more.
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You may judge,
we filled the well up fast enough.
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Do you make anything of what's cut
on that gold coin you have there?'
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My friend held the coin up to the light.
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'I think I can,' he said.
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'It seems to be GWS,
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July 24th, 1865.'