As I was the youngest niece in Mother’s big family, the aunties all tended to spoil me and Alice was no exception. ‘Oh, please, by train, aunt Winnie, dear! We’ve been there by car three times already!’Īlice was one of my favourite relatives and I was delighted to be invited to her house. ‘Sally, would you like to go there by train or by car?’ aunt Winnie asked. She invited me to join her on a trip to Pittsburgh, fifty miles away, to see her sister, my aunt Alice. It was midsummer, hot and wet in central Kansas, and time for my aunt Winnie’s annual vacation from the store, where she worked as a clerk six days a week. I think I was in second grade at that time. I must have been about eight when I made my first train trip. We both felt strange horror which neither could explain. Neither McLeod nor I ever mentioned what we had seen to anyone. Sampson was gone: not to be found, and I believe no trace of him has ever come to light since. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I can tell you one thing - he was as thin as a rail, and water was running down his hair and clothing and/ he said, looking round and whispering as if he hardly liked to hear himself, ‘I’m not at all sure that he was alive.’ Naturally I came and looked, and naturally there was no one there.Īnd next day Mr. About five minutes before I woke you, I found myself looking out of this window here, and there was a man sitting on Sampson’s window-sill, and looking in.’ ‘What sort of man? Is anyone from the senior class going to play a trick on him? Or was it a burglar?!’ McLeod seemed unwilling to answer. ‘Come,’ he said, - ‘come, there’s someone getting in through Sampson’s window. I saw McLeod in the light of the moon which was looking right into our windows. At an hour which I can’t remember exactly, but some time between one and two, I was woken up by somebody shaking me. Sampson slept in the main building on the first floor.
Voice actor for lily petz horse club wii windows#
We - McLeod and I - slept in a bedroom the windows of which looked out at the main building of the school. That night the third and last incident in my story happened. The next day Sampson was in school again, much as usual. The phrase on it was simple and harmless enough: ‘If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.’ That same afternoon I took it out of my bag - I know for certain it was the same bit of paper, for I made a fingermark on it - and there was no single piece of writing on it! I put the extra paper in my bag and kept it. I questioned everyone myself! Then I thought of counting the bits of paper: there were seventeen of them on the desk, and sixteen boys in the form.
The top paper on the desk was written in red ink - which no one used - and it wasn’t in anyone’s handwriting who was in the class. I noticed that he hadn’t taken any of the papers with him, so we went to look at them on his desk. All at once he got up, made some odd sort of noise in his throat, and rushed out. We did it and showed up our bits of paper, and Sampson began looking through them. We were told to make a conditional sentence, expressing a future consequence. There was one other incident of the same kind. Then he wanted to know why McLeod had put it down, and where his family lived, and if there was such a lake there, and things like that. When Sampson read it he got up and went to the man- tel-piece and stopped quite a long time without saying anything looking really embarrassed. The phrase was “Remember the lake among the four oaks.” Later McLeod told me that it had just come into his head.
Finally, very quickly he wrote a couple of lines on his paper, and showed it up with the rest. Now, on this occasion he ordered us each to make a sentence bringing in the verb memlnij ‘I remember.’ Well, most of us made up some ordinary sentence such as ‘I remember my father, ’ but the boy I mentioned - McLeod - was evidently thinking of something more interesting than that. One of his favourite methods was to make us construct sentences out of our own heads to illustrate the rules he was trying to teach us. Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. He had travelled a good deal, and had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was some competition among us to get a chance to listen to him. He was a tall, well-built, pale, black-bearded man. One term a new master made his appearance. The school was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130 boys there as a rule, and so a considerable staff of masters was required. I came to that school in September and among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to. It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I still can’t explain it.
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