On Midsummer Night, Pomp once related, on Midsummer Night, you can find out who going to die soon. You know this? This is true. You take yourself down to the church-porch, and you sit yourself there, and at midnight, all the spirits of those people going to die during the year, those spirits all come to the graveyard and knock on the church door. The first spirit who knock, he the first to die, and the second to knock, he die second. They all stand in a line, like for rations. Truth.

Truth? I said. Absolute truth?

He laughed. Truth!

Pomp declared that a man of his parish — a youth well known to him — undertook this summer frolic with two maids upon whom he doted; the amorous youth believing that such a scene of horror was well calculated to draw one maid or the other into his arms. But he saw not the spectacle; for come eleven, he had fallen soundly asleep, and was insensible; and come twelve, his two giggling companions fell silent and gaped in awe as his own spirit rose and knocked first upon the door.

There it is, his own ghost — tap, tap, tap. And he wake up, all frowzle-headed, and ask why those girls disturb him. He says, “Why you wake me up with your tapping?”

But they can’t tell him. And the ghosts, they is all disappeared. So the girls don’t say nothing, staring at each other all affrighted.

And a month later — this is true — month later, he was dead of a putrid fever.

I tell this tale in memory of Private Pompey Lewis, friend Pomp; who I still ardently dream shall sit beside my grandchildren and speak of kindly horrors.