WITCH WINNIE'S MYSTERY.

CHAPTER I.

THE FIRST ESCAPADE OF THE SEASON.

G

IRLS!" Winnie exclaimed excitedly

as we en

tered our

study parlor after recitation, "I am wild with curiosity to know what they are doing in the hospital. All the morning, while I have

been trying to study, there has been the greatest thumping and bumping going on in there. I wonder whether they are chaining

down an insane patient, or if the ghostly nurses are having a war dance."

"Why didn't you look and see?" Cynthia Vaughn asked, pointing to the transom over a locked door, which formerly opened from our parlor into the hospital ward.

Madame had made abundant provision for sickness in the original arrangement of the school building. A large sky-lighted room had been set apart as an infirmary, and a little suite of rooms in the great tower adjoining as the physician's quarters. But it was rare indeed that any one was ill at Madame's, and when a pupil was taken sick, her parents usually took her home at once. So the doctor, having nothing to do but to hear the récitations in physiology, preferred not to reside in the school building, and the pretty suite of rooms, consisting of a parlor and three bedrooms, was assigned to us, and the hospital proper was used as a trunk room. Winnie always maintained that ghosts of medical students experimented there in the night watches on imaginary cases of vivisection, that corpses were embalmed, and shrieks and howls were to be heard, in the wee small hours, while phantom lights fumed blue on the other side of the transom, and sickly odors

of ether and other drugs penetrated through the keyhole. We all laughed at Winnie's phantasms, but there were none of us so brave as to care to visit that room after nightfall. The trunks looked too much like coffins, and there were dresses of Madame's sewed up in bags made of sheets, and suspended from the roof, which had the uncanny look of corpses of people who had hanged themselves.

It was broad daylight now, and we were not at all nervous, and Cynthia remarked scornfully, "Winnie has told us so many of her bug-a-boo stories that she has come to actually believe in them herself. She dare not for her life look through that transom to see what occasions the noise in the hospital." "You dare me to do it?" Winnie asked, confronting Cynthia with flashing eyes.

"Don't, Winnie," I plead.

right to peep."

Winnie hesitated.

66

'We have no

"I told you so," Cynthia said provokingly.

"She dares not look. It is only a lumber room. The noise was probably made by some cat chasing a rat around.”

"It would take a whole army of cats to make the noises I have heard," Winnie replied hotly, at the same time rolling Adelaide's

great Saratoga trunk in front of the door. "There it goes again!" and as a loud hammering re-echoed through the adjoining room, she sprang upon the trunk. The transom was still too high for her to reach. "Quick, girls, something else," she exclaimed, and Milly dragged the "Commissary Department" from its retirement under my bed.

The "commissary" was a small, oldfashioned trunk, which had belonged to my great-grandmother. It was covered with cowskin, the hair only partially worn off, and studded with brass-headed nails which formed the initials of my ancestors. It was lined with newspapers bearing the date 1790, and was altogether a very quaint and curious relic. Its chief interest to us, however, lay in the fact that it had come to us from my home filled with all the good things that a farm can produce and a mistakenly soft-hearted mother send. There were mince pies and pickles, a great wedge of cheese, a box of honey, pounds of maple-sugar, tiny sausages, a great fruitcake, jars of pickled peaches, ginger snaps, walnuts and chestnuts, pop-corn and molasses candy, and what Milly called the interstixes were filled in with delicious doughnuts. It was a treasure house of richness upon which

we revelled in the night after the gas was turned out and we all met in our nightgowns, and formed a semicircle sitting on the floor around the register, while Winnie told the most deliciously frightful ghost and robber

stories.

Then, it was that the "commissary" yielded up its contraband stores and we ate, and shivered, partly with cold and partly with delightful terror inspired by the rehearsal of legends for which Winnie ransacked, during the day, the pages of the detective Vidocq and Poe's prose tales.

Then if a mouse did but squeak in the deserted hospital ward, or the shuffle of Miss Noakes's slippers was heard in the corridor outside, we all scuttled incontinently to our beds, and Winnie snored loudly, while Milly buried her head beneath the blankets. Miss Noakes. occupied a large room opposite the hospital. She was a disagreeable, prowling teacher and we had nicknamed her Snooks.

The "commissary" being now carefully poised upon the curved top of Adelaide's trunk, Winnie mounted upon it, and found that it was exactly what was needed, as it brought her face just on a level with the

transom.