about it. Every one knows the 'Dead-man's Scratch,' and I only wonder you, of all fellows, don't know everything about it."

"I don't remember, but I may have heard it all the same; there's such a lot of these yarns afloat."

"Yarns! Will you just write to your mother that you're always talking about, and see if she'll call it a yarn?""

"There ain't much humbug about that little bit," added Mat Long, strolling up ready equipped for parade. "I would just write and ask the old woman; she may know something to turn away the mischief of it."

"Well, will you write for me, Bill? Don't mind what I said when you spilt the tea; I was only joking."

'Why, can't you write yourself?"

"You know I ain't much of a scholar," was the reply; "and as the hedge-schoolmistress will have to read it to mother, I'd like it to be decent."

"Oh, all serene! I'll do it for you; only you must wait till the evening."

So it was arranged, and all went off to their duties until late in the afternoon, when Bill Hewitt, Mat Long, and Charley Greydon met in a public-house outside the barrack-gate to concoct a letter to the

mother of the latter, asking her opinion and counsel on a matter of such serious importance to Charley. It was quite a week before a reply was received from Somersetshire, and when the letter came to be read, it was found that the old lady quite agreed with the views of her son's advisers as to the extreme danger of the Dead-man's Scratch; gave a history of the reasons for the belief; quoted numerous instances wherein the warning had proved fatal; and wound up with a most earnest appeal to her only son to be guided by her in taking a certain infallible specific, of which the recipe was enclosed. Charley Greydon's jaw dropped when he heard his own mother's opinions so carefully and yet so urgently expressed, and he at once betook himself to the manufacture of the most unsavoury nostrum prescribed, taking the first portion as soon as ever the necessary and, to say the truth, somewhat loathsome ingredients could be got together, with a full determination to repeat the dose, as directed, every day after breakfast for the space of one lunar month. At first it appeared to do him a considerable amount of good; the 'scratch' rapidly healed up; his usual good spirits seemed in a measure to return; and he was commencing to feel more at his ease regarding both the dream and the cut in his forehead, when he again

was greeted, one morning about ten days after the first event, by his comrades, who, with horror on their countenances, handed him a looking-glass, wherein he plainly saw a second Dead-man's Dead-man's Scratch similar to the previous one, but on the opposite side of the forehead. Charley Greydon was completely stunned by the discovery; all hope deserted him at once; and he sat down on his bed, and burst into tears.

CHAPTER II.

T is almost as difficult a thing in barrack-life to

IT

keep anything that may have happened a secret, as it is to get the true version of the story accepted. That a certain man vomited something black cannot possibly be altogether concealed; but the sufferer will find it a Herculean labour to induce nine-tenths of the regiment to disbelieve the first version of the story that gets to their ears, to the effect that he brought up three crows! In accordance with this. well-known military fact, it soon got noised about the barrack-rooms of the Canterbury garrison, that one of the 30th Hussars had been bewitched; then that he nightly had the most appalling visions; and, lastly, that his death had been foretold to all his