“In the middle of my search my mother woke up, and of course I had to explain.  I told her about her door opening, and the knocks on the banister, and that I had come up and found her asleep.  I said nothing about the smell, which was not very distinct; but told her that the thing happening twice had made me a bit nervous, and possibly fanciful, and I thought I would take a look ’round, just to feel satisfied.

“I have thought since that the reason I made no mention of the smell, was not only that I did not want to frighten my mother, for I was scarcely that myself; but because I had only a vague half-knowledge that I associated the smell with fancies too indefinite and peculiar to bear talking about.  You will understand that I am able now to analyze and put the thing into words; but then I did not even know my chief reason for saying nothing; let alone appreciate its possible significance.

“It was my mother, after all, who put part of my vague sensations into words:—­

“‘What a disagreeable smell!’ she exclaimed, and was silent a moment, looking at me.  Then:—­’You feel there’s something wrong?’ still looking at me, very quietly but with a little, nervous note of questioning expectancy.

“‘I don’t know,’ I said.  ’I can’t understand it, unless you’ve really been walking about in your sleep.’

“‘The smell,’ she said.

“‘Yes,’ I replied.  ’That’s what puzzles me too.  I’ll take a walk through the house; but I don’t suppose it’s anything.’

“I lit her candle, and taking the lamp, I went through the other bedrooms, and afterward all over the house, including the three underground cellars, which was a little trying to the nerves, seeing that I was more nervous than I would admit.

“Then I went back to my mother, and told her there was really nothing to bother about; and, you know, in the end, we talked ourselves into believing it was nothing.  My mother would not agree that she might have been sleepwalking; but she was ready to put the door opening down to the fault of the latch, which certainly snicked very lightly.  As for the knocks, they might be the old warped woodwork of the house cracking a bit, or a mouse rattling a piece of loose plaster.  The smell was more difficult to explain; but finally we agreed that it might easily be the queer night smell of the moist earth, coming in through the open window of my mother’s room, from the back garden, or—­for that matter—­from the little churchyard beyond the big wall at the bottom of the garden.

“And so we quietened down, and finally I went to bed, and to sleep.

“I think this is certainly a lesson on the way we humans can delude ourselves; for there was not one of these explanations that my reason could really accept.  Try to imagine yourself in the same circumstances, and you will see how absurd our attempts to explain the happenings really were.

“In the morning, when I came down to breakfast, we talked it all over again, and whilst we agreed that it was strange, we also agreed that we had begun to imagine funny things in the backs of our minds, which now we felt half ashamed to admit.  This is very strange when you come to look into it; but very human.