I lived in "converted"
ones--old houses officiating as dak-bungalows--where nothing was in its proper
place and there wasn't even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand palaces
where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as
through a broken pane. I lived in dak-bungalows where the last entry in the
visitors' book was fifteen months old, and where they slashed off the curry-
kid's head with a sword. It was my good luck to meet all sorts of men, from
sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying from British Regiments, to
drunken loafers who threw whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still
greater good fortune just to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair
proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted itself in dak-
bungalows, I wondered that I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily
hang about a dak-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died
mad in dak-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of them. Up
till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant's method of handling them, as
shown in "The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other Stories.
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