74 LIFE OF SIR JOHN LUBBOCK cu. 



heard the breathing. After a while it ceased, and 

 in the morning he thought he must have dreamt 

 it. Some time afterwards he heard it again, and 

 after much trouble found that the wire of a 

 lightning conductor rubbed against the wall and 

 made the noise. He altered the wire, and so 

 laid the ghost, which, he said, gave great offence 

 and made him quite unpopular with many of the 

 St. Andrews people. 



A. K. H. B. with his stories, which he told 

 admirably, and his knowledge of men, was always 

 excellent company, as, in rather a different way, 

 with his varied knowledge and most pleasant 

 way of imparting it, was Sir John himself. Sir 

 Mount Stuart in his diary for August of this year 

 writes : 



Sir John and Lady Lubbock joined us yesterday. 

 They have been spending the autumn at St. Andrews, 

 where he has seen a great deal of Professor Heddle, 

 who introduced him to the volcanoes of the end of the 

 carboniferous age, of which memorials remain in Largo 

 Law and so many other eminences in that neighbourhood. 



Colonel Biddulph told us at dinner that a sea captain, 

 whom he knew personally, had gone with a number of 

 his crew before a magistrate at Calcutta, and solemnly 

 deposed that he had seen a huge sea-serpent fighting 

 with a whale. " What he had really seen," said Lubbock, 

 " was a struggle between a cachalot and one of the 

 enormous cuttle-fish on which it feeds. The arms of 

 a huge individual of this species clasped round its 

 antagonist would have very much the effect of the 

 coils of a serpent." 



I made Lubbock tell the story mentioned in one of 

 the Indian volumes of these notes, of the too kind friend 

 who had sent him a specimen of Heloderma horridum, 

 not knowing that it was intensely poisonous. That 

 led to some talk about other lizards, and Arthur asked 

 whether there was not one that had a third eye on 



