That morning wandering about his plantation, more like a frightened soul than its creator and master, he dodged the white parasol bobbing up here and there like a buoy adrift on a sea of dark-green plants.

The crop promised to be magnificent, and the fashionable philosopher of the age took other than a merely scientific interest in the experiment.

His investments were judicious, but he had always some little money lying by, for experiments.
After lunch, being left alone with Renouard, he talked a little of cultivation and such matters.

Then suddenly: "By the way, is it true what my sister tells me, that your plantation boys have been disturbed by a ghost ?" Renouard, who since the ladies had left the table was not keeping such a strict watch on himself, came out of his abstraction with a start and a stiff smile.
"My foreman had some trouble with them during my absence.

They funk working in a certain field on the slope of the hill." "A ghost here!" exclaimed the amused professor.