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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Three Ghost Stories, by Charles Dickens
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Three Ghost Stories
+
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+
+
+Release Date: March 9, 2013  [eBook #1289]
+[This file was first posted on April 5, 1998]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE GHOST STORIES***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of “Christmas Stories”
+by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                           THREE GHOST STORIES
+
+
+                            by Charles Dickens
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The Haunted House             121
+The Trial For Murder          303
+The Signal-Man                312
+
+
+
+
+THE HAUNTED HOUSE.
+IN TWO CHAPTERS. {121}
+
+
+                                 [1859.]
+
+
+
+THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE.
+
+
+UNDER none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none
+of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance
+with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece.  I saw it in
+the daylight, with the sun upon it.  There was no wind, no rain, no
+lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to
+heighten its effect.  More than that: I had come to it direct from a
+railway station: it was not more than a mile distant from the railway
+station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I
+had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the
+embankment in the valley.  I will not say that everything was utterly
+commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly
+commonplace people—and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on
+myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it, any fine
+autumn morning.
+
+The manner of my lighting on it was this.
+
+I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop by
+the way, to look at the house.  My health required a temporary residence
+in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who had happened
+to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely
+place.  I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and
+had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern
+Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to
+find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I
+hadn’t been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the first imbecility
+of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager
+by battle with the man who sat opposite me.  That opposite man had had,
+through the night—as that opposite man always has—several legs too many,
+and all of them too long.  In addition to this unreasonable conduct
+(which was only to be expected of him), he had had a pencil and a
+pocket-book, and had been perpetually listening and taking notes.  It had
+appeared to me that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and
+bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking
+them, under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering
+way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head whenever he
+listened.  He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his
+demeanour became unbearable.
+
+It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I had
+out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country, and the
+curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the stars and
+between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller and said:
+
+“I _beg_ your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in me?”
+For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my travelling-cap or
+my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.
+
+The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if the
+back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a lofty
+look of compassion for my insignificance:
+
+“In you, sir?—B.”
+
+“B, sir?” said I, growing warm.
+
+“I have nothing to do with you, sir,” returned the gentleman; “pray let
+me listen—O.”
+
+He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.
+
+At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no communication with
+the guard, is a serious position.  The thought came to my relief that the
+gentleman might be what is popularly called a Rapper: one of a sect for
+(some of) whom I have the highest respect, but whom I don’t believe in.
+I was going to ask him the question, when he took the bread out of my
+mouth.
+
+“You will excuse me,” said the gentleman contemptuously, “if I am too
+much in advance of common humanity to trouble myself at all about it.  I
+have passed the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time now—in
+spiritual intercourse.”
+
+“O!” said I, somewhat snappishly.
+
+“The conferences of the night began,” continued the gentleman, turning
+several leaves of his note-book, “with this message: ‘Evil communications
+corrupt good manners.’”
+
+“Sound,” said I; “but, absolutely new?”
+
+“New from spirits,” returned the gentleman.
+
+I could only repeat my rather snappish “O!” and ask if I might be
+favoured with the last communication.
+
+“‘A bird in the hand,’” said the gentleman, reading his last entry with
+great solemnity, “‘is worth two in the Bosh.’”
+
+“Truly I am of the same opinion,” said I; “but shouldn’t it be Bush?”
+
+“It came to me, Bosh,” returned the gentleman.
+
+The gentleman then informed me that the spirit of Socrates had delivered
+this special revelation in the course of the night.  “My friend, I hope
+you are pretty well.  There are two in this railway carriage.  How do you
+do?  There are seventeen thousand four hundred and seventy-nine spirits
+here, but you cannot see them.  Pythagoras is here.  He is not at liberty
+to mention it, but hopes you like travelling.”  Galileo likewise had
+dropped in, with this scientific intelligence.  “I am glad to see you,
+_amico_.  _Come sta_?  Water will freeze when it is cold enough.
+_Addio_!”  In the course of the night, also, the following phenomena had
+occurred.  Bishop Butler had insisted on spelling his name, “Bubler,” for
+which offence against orthography and good manners he had been dismissed
+as out of temper.  John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification) had
+repudiated the authorship of Paradise Lost, and had introduced, as joint
+authors of that poem, two Unknown gentlemen, respectively named Grungers
+and Scadgingtone.  And Prince Arthur, nephew of King John of England, had
+described himself as tolerably comfortable in the seventh circle, where
+he was learning to paint on velvet, under the direction of Mrs. Trimmer
+and Mary Queen of Scots.
+
+If this should meet the eye of the gentleman who favoured me with these
+disclosures, I trust he will excuse my confessing that the sight of the
+rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent Order of the vast
+Universe, made me impatient of them.  In a word, I was so impatient of
+them, that I was mightily glad to get out at the next station, and to
+exchange these clouds and vapours for the free air of Heaven.
+
+By that time it was a beautiful morning.  As I walked away among such
+leaves as had already fallen from the golden, brown, and russet trees;
+and as I looked around me on the wonders of Creation, and thought of the
+steady, unchanging, and harmonious laws by which they are sustained; the
+gentleman’s spiritual intercourse seemed to me as poor a piece of
+journey-work as ever this world saw.  In which heathen state of mind, I
+came within view of the house, and stopped to examine it attentively.
+
+It was a solitary house, standing in a sadly neglected garden: a pretty
+even square of some two acres.  It was a house of about the time of
+George the Second; as stiff, as cold, as formal, and in as bad taste, as
+could possibly be desired by the most loyal admirer of the whole quartet
+of Georges.  It was uninhabited, but had, within a year or two, been
+cheaply repaired to render it habitable; I say cheaply, because the work
+had been done in a surface manner, and was already decaying as to the
+paint and plaster, though the colours were fresh.  A lop-sided board
+drooped over the garden wall, announcing that it was “to let on very
+reasonable terms, well furnished.”  It was much too closely and heavily
+shadowed by trees, and, in particular, there were six tall poplars before
+the front windows, which were excessively melancholy, and the site of
+which had been extremely ill chosen.
+
+It was easy to see that it was an avoided house—a house that was shunned
+by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church spire some half a
+mile off—a house that nobody would take.  And the natural inference was,
+that it had the reputation of being a haunted house.
+
+                       [Picture: The haunted house]
+
+No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and night is so solemn
+to me, as the early morning.  In the summer-time, I often rise very
+early, and repair to my room to do a day’s work before breakfast, and I
+am always on those occasions deeply impressed by the stillness and
+solitude around me.  Besides that there is something awful in the being
+surrounded by familiar faces asleep—in the knowledge that those who are
+dearest to us and to whom we are dearest, are profoundly unconscious of
+us, in an impassive state, anticipative of that mysterious condition to
+which we are all tending—the stopped life, the broken threads of
+yesterday, the deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but
+abandoned occupation, all are images of Death.  The tranquillity of the
+hour is the tranquillity of Death.  The colour and the chill have the
+same association.  Even a certain air that familiar household objects
+take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of the night into
+the morning, of being newer, and as they used to be long ago, has its
+counterpart in the subsidence of the worn face of maturity or age, in
+death, into the old youthful look.  Moreover, I once saw the apparition
+of my father, at this hour.  He was alive and well, and nothing ever came
+of it, but I saw him in the daylight, sitting with his back towards me,
+on a seat that stood beside my bed.  His head was resting on his hand,
+and whether he was slumbering or grieving, I could not discern.  Amazed
+to see him there, I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and
+watched him.  As he did not move, I spoke to him more than once.  As he
+did not move then, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder,
+as I thought—and there was no such thing.
+
+For all these reasons, and for others less easily and briefly statable, I
+find the early morning to be my most ghostly time.  Any house would be
+more or less haunted, to me, in the early morning; and a haunted house
+could scarcely address me to greater advantage than then.
+
+I walked on into the village, with the desertion of this house upon my
+mind, and I found the landlord of the little inn, sanding his door-step.
+I bespoke breakfast, and broached the subject of the house.
+
+“Is it haunted?” I asked.
+
+The landlord looked at me, shook his head, and answered, “I say nothing.”
+
+“Then it _is_ haunted?”
+
+“Well!” cried the landlord, in an outburst of frankness that had the
+appearance of desperation—“I wouldn’t sleep in it.”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“If I wanted to have all the bells in a house ring, with nobody to ring
+’em; and all the doors in a house bang, with nobody to bang ’em; and all
+sorts of feet treading about, with no feet there; why, then,” said the
+landlord, “I’d sleep in that house.”
+
+“Is anything seen there?”
+
+The landlord looked at me again, and then, with his former appearance of
+desperation, called down his stable-yard for “Ikey!”
+
+The call produced a high-shouldered young fellow, with a round red face,
+a short crop of sandy hair, a very broad humorous mouth, a turned-up
+nose, and a great sleeved waistcoat of purple bars, with mother-of-pearl
+buttons, that seemed to be growing upon him, and to be in a fair way—if
+it were not pruned—of covering his head and overunning his boots.
+
+“This gentleman wants to know,” said the landlord, “if anything’s seen at
+the Poplars.”
+
+“’Ooded woman with a howl,” said Ikey, in a state of great freshness.
+
+“Do you mean a cry?”
+
+“I mean a bird, sir.”
+
+“A hooded woman with an owl.  Dear me!  Did you ever see her?”
+
+“I seen the howl.”
+
+“Never the woman?”
+
+“Not so plain as the howl, but they always keeps together.”
+
+“Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly as the owl?”
+
+“Lord bless you, sir!  Lots.”
+
+“Who?”
+
+“Lord bless you, sir!  Lots.”
+
+“The general-dealer opposite, for instance, who is opening his shop?”
+
+“Perkins?  Bless you, Perkins wouldn’t go a-nigh the place.  No!”
+observed the young man, with considerable feeling; “he an’t overwise,
+an’t Perkins, but he an’t such a fool as _that_.”
+
+(Here, the landlord murmured his confidence in Perkins’s knowing better.)
+
+“Who is—or who was—the hooded woman with the owl?  Do you know?”
+
+“Well!” said Ikey, holding up his cap with one hand while he scratched
+his head with the other, “they say, in general, that she was murdered,
+and the howl he ’ooted the while.”
+
+This very concise summary of the facts was all I could learn, except that
+a young man, as hearty and likely a young man as ever I see, had been
+took with fits and held down in ’em, after seeing the hooded woman.
+Also, that a personage, dimly described as “a hold chap, a sort of
+one-eyed tramp, answering to the name of Joby, unless you challenged him
+as Greenwood, and then he said, ‘Why not? and even if so, mind your own
+business,’” had encountered the hooded woman, a matter of five or six
+times.  But, I was not materially assisted by these witnesses: inasmuch
+as the first was in California, and the last was, as Ikey said (and he
+was confirmed by the landlord), Anywheres.
+
+Now, although I regard with a hushed and solemn fear, the mysteries,
+between which and this state of existence is interposed the barrier of
+the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live; and
+although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of them;
+I can no more reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells,
+creaking of boards, and such-like insignificances, with the majestic
+beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am permitted
+to understand, than I had been able, a little while before, to yoke the
+spiritual intercourse of my fellow-traveller to the chariot of the rising
+sun.  Moreover, I had lived in two haunted houses—both abroad.  In one of
+these, an old Italian palace, which bore the reputation of being very
+badly haunted indeed, and which had recently been twice abandoned on that
+account, I lived eight months, most tranquilly and pleasantly:
+notwithstanding that the house had a score of mysterious bedrooms, which
+were never used, and possessed, in one large room in which I sat reading,
+times out of number at all hours, and next to which I slept, a haunted
+chamber of the first pretensions.  I gently hinted these considerations
+to the landlord.  And as to this particular house having a bad name, I
+reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and
+how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I
+were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking, old
+drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he
+would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture!  All this
+wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to
+confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I made in my life.
+
+To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted
+house, and was already half resolved to take it.  So, after breakfast, I
+got the keys from Perkins’s brother-in-law (a whip and harness maker, who
+keeps the Post Office, and is under submission to a most rigorous wife of
+the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel persuasion), and went up to the
+house, attended by my landlord and by Ikey.
+
+Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal.  The slowly
+changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the
+last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and
+ill-fitted.  It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a
+flavour of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable
+decay which settles on all the work of man’s hands whenever it’s not
+turned to man’s account.  The kitchens and offices were too large, and
+too remote from each other.  Above stairs and below, waste tracts of
+passage intervened between patches of fertility represented by rooms; and
+there was a mouldy old well with a green growth upon it, hiding like a
+murderous trap, near the bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row
+of bells.  One of these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded
+white letters, MASTER B.  This, they told me, was the bell that rang the
+most.
+
+“Who was Master B.?” I asked.  “Is it known what he did while the owl
+hooted?”
+
+“Rang the bell,” said Ikey.
+
+I was rather struck by the prompt dexterity with which this young man
+pitched his fur cap at the bell, and rang it himself.  It was a loud,
+unpleasant bell, and made a very disagreeable sound.  The other bells
+were inscribed according to the names of the rooms to which their wires
+were conducted: as “Picture Room,” “Double Room,” “Clock Room,” and the
+like.  Following Master B.’s bell to its source I found that young
+gentleman to have had but indifferent third-class accommodation in a
+triangular cabin under the cock-loft, with a corner fireplace which
+Master B. must have been exceedingly small if he were ever able to warm
+himself at, and a corner chimney-piece like a pyramidal staircase to the
+ceiling for Tom Thumb.  The papering of one side of the room had dropped
+down bodily, with fragments of plaster adhering to it, and almost blocked
+up the door.  It appeared that Master B., in his spiritual condition,
+always made a point of pulling the paper down.  Neither the landlord nor
+Ikey could suggest why he made such a fool of himself.
+
+Except that the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top, I made
+no other discoveries.  It was moderately well furnished, but sparely.
+Some of the furniture—say, a third—was as old as the house; the rest was
+of various periods within the last half-century.  I was referred to a
+corn-chandler in the market-place of the county town to treat for the
+house.  I went that day, and I took it for six months.
+
+It was just the middle of October when I moved in with my maiden sister
+(I venture to call her eight-and-thirty, she is so very handsome,
+sensible, and engaging).  We took with us, a deaf stable-man, my
+bloodhound Turk, two women servants, and a young person called an Odd
+Girl.  I have reason to record of the attendant last enumerated, who was
+one of the Saint Lawrence’s Union Female Orphans, that she was a fatal
+mistake and a disastrous engagement.
+
+The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a raw cold
+day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house was most
+depressing.  The cook (an amiable woman, but of a weak turn of intellect)
+burst into tears on beholding the kitchen, and requested that her silver
+watch might be delivered over to her sister (2 Tuppintock’s Gardens,
+Liggs’s Walk, Clapham Rise), in the event of anything happening to her
+from the damp.  Streaker, the housemaid, feigned cheerfulness, but was
+the greater martyr.  The Odd Girl, who had never been in the country,
+alone was pleased, and made arrangements for sowing an acorn in the
+garden outside the scullery window, and rearing an oak.
+
+We went, before dark, through all the natural—as opposed to
+supernatural—miseries incidental to our state.  Dispiriting reports
+ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and descended
+from the upper rooms.  There was no rolling-pin, there was no salamander
+(which failed to surprise me, for I don’t know what it is), there was
+nothing in the house, what there was, was broken, the last people must
+have lived like pigs, what could the meaning of the landlord be?  Through
+these distresses, the Odd Girl was cheerful and exemplary.  But within
+four hours after dark we had got into a supernatural groove, and the Odd
+Girl had seen “Eyes,” and was in hysterics.
+
+My sister and I had agreed to keep the haunting strictly to ourselves,
+and my impression was, and still is, that I had not left Ikey, when he
+helped to unload the cart, alone with the women, or any one of them, for
+one minute.  Nevertheless, as I say, the Odd Girl had “seen Eyes” (no
+other explanation could ever be drawn from her), before nine, and by ten
+o’clock had had as much vinegar applied to her as would pickle a handsome
+salmon.
+
+I leave a discerning public to judge of my feelings, when, under these
+untoward circumstances, at about half-past ten o’clock Master B.’s bell
+began to ring in a most infuriated manner, and Turk howled until the
+house resounded with his lamentations!
+
+I hope I may never again be in a state of mind so unchristian as the
+mental frame in which I lived for some weeks, respecting the memory of
+Master B.  Whether his bell was rung by rats, or mice, or bats, or wind,
+or what other accidental vibration, or sometimes by one cause, sometimes
+another, and sometimes by collusion, I don’t know; but, certain it is,
+that it did ring two nights out of three, until I conceived the happy
+idea of twisting Master B.’s neck—in other words, breaking his bell short
+off—and silencing that young gentleman, as to my experience and belief,
+for ever.
+
+But, by that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of
+catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very
+inconvenient disorder.  She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with
+unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions.  I would address the servants
+in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.’s
+room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.’s bell away and balked the
+ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and
+died, to clothe himself with no better behaviour than would most
+unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a
+birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of
+existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I
+was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting
+the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I
+say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in
+such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd
+Girl’s suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring among us
+like a parochial petrifaction.
+
+Streaker, the housemaid, too, had an attribute of a most discomfiting
+nature.  I am unable to say whether she was of an unusually lymphatic
+temperament, or what else was the matter with her, but this young woman
+became a mere Distillery for the production of the largest and most
+transparent tears I ever met with.  Combined with these characteristics,
+was a peculiar tenacity of hold in those specimens, so that they didn’t
+fall, but hung upon her face and nose.  In this condition, and mildly and
+deplorably shaking her head, her silence would throw me more heavily than
+the Admirable Crichton could have done in a verbal disputation for a
+purse of money.  Cook, likewise, always covered me with confusion as with
+a garment, by neatly winding up the session with the protest that the
+Ouse was wearing her out, and by meekly repeating her last wishes
+regarding her silver watch.
+
+As to our nightly life, the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us,
+and there is no such contagion under the sky.  Hooded woman?  According
+to the accounts, we were in a perfect Convent of hooded women.  Noises?
+With that contagion downstairs, I myself have sat in the dismal parlour,
+listening, until I have heard so many and such strange noises, that they
+would have chilled my blood if I had not warmed it by dashing out to make
+discoveries.  Try this in bed, in the dead of the night: try this at your
+own comfortable fire-side, in the life of the night.  You can fill any
+house with noises, if you will, until you have a noise for every nerve in
+your nervous system.
+
+I repeat; the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us, and there is
+no such contagion under the sky.  The women (their noses in a chronic
+state of excoriation from smelling-salts) were always primed and loaded
+for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair-triggers.  The two elder
+detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions that were considered doubly
+hazardous, and she always established the reputation of such adventures
+by coming back cataleptic.  If Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark,
+we knew we should presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took
+place so constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go
+about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe is
+called The Auctioneer, to every domestic he met with.
+
+It was in vain to do anything.  It was in vain to be frightened, for the
+moment in one’s own person, by a real owl, and then to show the owl.  It
+was in vain to discover, by striking an accidental discord on the piano,
+that Turk always howled at particular notes and combinations.  It was in
+vain to be a Rhadamanthus with the bells, and if an unfortunate bell rang
+without leave, to have it down inexorably and silence it.  It was in vain
+to fire up chimneys, let torches down the well, charge furiously into
+suspected rooms and recesses.  We changed servants, and it was no better.
+The new set ran away, and a third set came, and it was no better.  At
+last, our comfortable housekeeping got to be so disorganised and
+wretched, that I one night dejectedly said to my sister: “Patty, I begin
+to despair of our getting people to go on with us here, and I think we
+must give this up.”
+
+My sister, who is a woman of immense spirit, replied, “No, John, don’t
+give it up.  Don’t be beaten, John.  There is another way.”
+
+“And what is that?” said I.
+
+“John,” returned my sister, “if we are not to be driven out of this
+house, and that for no reason whatever, that is apparent to you or me, we
+must help ourselves and take the house wholly and solely into our own
+hands.”
+
+“But, the servants,” said I.
+
+“Have no servants,” said my sister, boldly.
+
+Like most people in my grade of life, I had never thought of the
+possibility of going on without those faithful obstructions.  The notion
+was so new to me when suggested, that I looked very doubtful.  “We know
+they come here to be frightened and infect one another, and we know they
+are frightened and do infect one another,” said my sister.
+
+“With the exception of Bottles,” I observed, in a meditative tone.
+
+(The deaf stable-man.  I kept him in my service, and still keep him, as a
+phenomenon of moroseness not to be matched in England.)
+
+“To be sure, John,” assented my sister; “except Bottles.  And what does
+that go to prove?  Bottles talks to nobody, and hears nobody unless he is
+absolutely roared at, and what alarm has Bottles ever given, or taken!
+None.”
+
+This was perfectly true; the individual in question having retired, every
+night at ten o’clock, to his bed over the coach-house, with no other
+company than a pitchfork and a pail of water.  That the pail of water
+would have been over me, and the pitchfork through me, if I had put
+myself without announcement in Bottles’s way after that minute, I had
+deposited in my own mind as a fact worth remembering.  Neither had
+Bottles ever taken the least notice of any of our many uproars.  An
+imperturbable and speechless man, he had sat at his supper, with Streaker
+present in a swoon, and the Odd Girl marble, and had only put another
+potato in his cheek, or profited by the general misery to help himself to
+beefsteak pie.
+
+“And so,” continued my sister, “I exempt Bottles.  And considering, John,
+that the house is too large, and perhaps too lonely, to be kept well in
+hand by Bottles, you, and me, I propose that we cast about among our
+friends for a certain selected number of the most reliable and
+willing—form a Society here for three months—wait upon ourselves and one
+another—live cheerfully and socially—and see what happens.”
+
+I was so charmed with my sister, that I embraced her on the spot, and
+went into her plan with the greatest ardour.
+
+We were then in the third week of November; but, we took our measures so
+vigorously, and were so well seconded by the friends in whom we confided,
+that there was still a week of the month unexpired, when our party all
+came down together merrily, and mustered in the haunted house.
+
+I will mention, in this place, two small changes that I made while my
+sister and I were yet alone.  It occurring to me as not improbable that
+Turk howled in the house at night, partly because he wanted to get out of
+it, I stationed him in his kennel outside, but unchained; and I seriously
+warned the village that any man who came in his way must not expect to
+leave him without a rip in his own throat.  I then casually asked Ikey if
+he were a judge of a gun?  On his saying, “Yes, sir, I knows a good gun
+when I sees her,” I begged the favour of his stepping up to the house and
+looking at mine.
+
+“_She’s_ a true one, sir,” said Ikey, after inspecting a double-barrelled
+rifle that I bought in New York a few years ago.  “No mistake about
+_her_, sir.”
+
+“Ikey,” said I, “don’t mention it; I have seen something in this house.”
+
+“No, sir?” he whispered, greedily opening his eyes.  “’Ooded lady, sir?”
+
+“Don’t be frightened,” said I.  “It was a figure rather like you.”
+
+“Lord, sir?”
+
+“Ikey!” said I, shaking hands with him warmly: I may say affectionately;
+“if there is any truth in these ghost-stories, the greatest service I can
+do you, is, to fire at that figure.  And I promise you, by Heaven and
+earth, I will do it with this gun if I see it again!”
+
+The young man thanked me, and took his leave with some little
+precipitation, after declining a glass of liquor.  I imparted my secret
+to him, because I had never quite forgotten his throwing his cap at the
+bell; because I had, on another occasion, noticed something very like a
+fur cap, lying not far from the bell, one night when it had burst out
+ringing; and because I had remarked that we were at our ghostliest
+whenever he came up in the evening to comfort the servants.  Let me do
+Ikey no injustice.  He was afraid of the house, and believed in its being
+haunted; and yet he would play false on the haunting side, so surely as
+he got an opportunity.  The Odd Girl’s case was exactly similar.  She
+went about the house in a state of real terror, and yet lied monstrously
+and wilfully, and invented many of the alarms she spread, and made many
+of the sounds we heard.  I had had my eye on the two, and I know it.  It
+is not necessary for me, here, to account for this preposterous state of
+mind; I content myself with remarking that it is familiarly known to
+every intelligent man who has had fair medical, legal, or other watchful
+experience; that it is as well established and as common a state of mind
+as any with which observers are acquainted; and that it is one of the
+first elements, above all others, rationally to be suspected in, and
+strictly looked for, and separated from, any question of this kind.
+
+To return to our party.  The first thing we did when we were all
+assembled, was, to draw lots for bedrooms.  That done, and every bedroom,
+and, indeed, the whole house, having been minutely examined by the whole
+body, we allotted the various household duties, as if we had been on a
+gipsy party, or a yachting party, or a hunting party, or were
+shipwrecked.  I then recounted the floating rumours concerning the hooded
+lady, the owl, and Master B.: with others, still more filmy, which had
+floated about during our occupation, relative to some ridiculous old
+ghost of the female gender who went up and down, carrying the ghost of a
+round table; and also to an impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able
+to catch.  Some of these ideas I really believe our people below had
+communicated to one another in some diseased way, without conveying them
+in words.  We then gravely called one another to witness, that we were
+not there to be deceived, or to deceive—which we considered pretty much
+the same thing—and that, with a serious sense of responsibility, we would
+be strictly true to one another, and would strictly follow out the truth.
+The understanding was established, that any one who heard unusual noises
+in the night, and who wished to trace them, should knock at my door;
+lastly, that on Twelfth Night, the last night of holy Christmas, all our
+individual experiences since that then present hour of our coming
+together in the haunted house, should be brought to light for the good of
+all; and that we would hold our peace on the subject till then, unless on
+some remarkable provocation to break silence.
+
+We were, in number and in character, as follows:
+
+First—to get my sister and myself out of the way—there were we two.  In
+the drawing of lots, my sister drew her own room, and I drew Master B.’s.
+Next, there was our first cousin John Herschel, so called after the great
+astronomer: than whom I suppose a better man at a telescope does not
+breathe.  With him, was his wife: a charming creature to whom he had been
+married in the previous spring.  I thought it (under the circumstances)
+rather imprudent to bring her, because there is no knowing what even a
+false alarm may do at such a time; but I suppose he knew his own business
+best, and I must say that if she had been _my_ wife, I never could have
+left her endearing and bright face behind.  They drew the Clock Room.
+Alfred Starling, an uncommonly agreeable young fellow of eight-and-twenty
+for whom I have the greatest liking, was in the Double Room; mine,
+usually, and designated by that name from having a dressing-room within
+it, with two large and cumbersome windows, which no wedges _I_ was ever
+able to make, would keep from shaking, in any weather, wind or no wind.
+Alfred is a young fellow who pretends to be “fast” (another word for
+loose, as I understand the term), but who is much too good and sensible
+for that nonsense, and who would have distinguished himself before now,
+if his father had not unfortunately left him a small independence of two
+hundred a year, on the strength of which his only occupation in life has
+been to spend six.  I am in hopes, however, that his Banker may break, or
+that he may enter into some speculation guaranteed to pay twenty per
+cent.; for, I am convinced that if he could only be ruined, his fortune
+is made.  Belinda Bates, bosom friend of my sister, and a most
+intellectual, amiable, and delightful girl, got the Picture Room.  She
+has a fine genius for poetry, combined with real business earnestness,
+and “goes in”—to use an expression of Alfred’s—for Woman’s mission,
+Woman’s rights, Woman’s wrongs, and everything that is woman’s with a
+capital W, or is not and ought to be, or is and ought not to be.  “Most
+praiseworthy, my dear, and Heaven prosper you!” I whispered to her on the
+first night of my taking leave of her at the Picture-Room door, “but
+don’t overdo it.  And in respect of the great necessity there is, my
+darling, for more employments being within the reach of Woman than our
+civilisation has as yet assigned to her, don’t fly at the unfortunate
+men, even those men who are at first sight in your way, as if they were
+the natural oppressors of your sex; for, trust me, Belinda, they do
+sometimes spend their wages among wives and daughters, sisters, mothers,
+aunts, and grandmothers; and the play is, really, not _all_ Wolf and Red
+Riding-Hood, but has other parts in it.”  However, I digress.
+
+Belinda, as I have mentioned, occupied the Picture Room.  We had but
+three other chambers: the Corner Room, the Cupboard Room, and the Garden
+Room.  My old friend, Jack Governor, “slung his hammock,” as he called
+it, in the Corner Room.  I have always regarded Jack as the
+finest-looking sailor that ever sailed.  He is gray now, but as handsome
+as he was a quarter of a century ago—nay, handsomer.  A portly, cheery,
+well-built figure of a broad-shouldered man, with a frank smile, a
+brilliant dark eye, and a rich dark eyebrow.  I remember those under
+darker hair, and they look all the better for their silver setting.  He
+has been wherever his Union namesake flies, has Jack, and I have met old
+shipmates of his, away in the Mediterranean and on the other side of the
+Atlantic, who have beamed and brightened at the casual mention of his
+name, and have cried, “You know Jack Governor?  Then you know a prince of
+men!”  That he is!  And so unmistakably a naval officer, that if you were
+to meet him coming out of an Esquimaux snow-hut in seal’s skin, you would
+be vaguely persuaded he was in full naval uniform.
+
+Jack once had that bright clear eye of his on my sister; but, it fell out
+that he married another lady and took her to South America, where she
+died.  This was a dozen years ago or more.  He brought down with him to
+our haunted house a little cask of salt beef; for, he is always convinced
+that all salt beef not of his own pickling, is mere carrion, and
+invariably, when he goes to London, packs a piece in his portmanteau.  He
+had also volunteered to bring with him one “Nat Beaver,” an old comrade
+of his, captain of a merchantman.  Mr. Beaver, with a thick-set wooden
+face and figure, and apparently as hard as a block all over, proved to be
+an intelligent man, with a world of watery experiences in him, and great
+practical knowledge.  At times, there was a curious nervousness about
+him, apparently the lingering result of some old illness; but, it seldom
+lasted many minutes.  He got the Cupboard Room, and lay there next to Mr.
+Undery, my friend and solicitor: who came down, in an amateur capacity,
+“to go through with it,” as he said, and who plays whist better than the
+whole Law List, from the red cover at the beginning to the red cover at
+the end.
+
+I never was happier in my life, and I believe it was the universal
+feeling among us.  Jack Governor, always a man of wonderful resources,
+was Chief Cook, and made some of the best dishes I ever ate, including
+unapproachable curries.  My sister was pastrycook and confectioner.
+Starling and I were Cook’s Mate, turn and turn about, and on special
+occasions the chief cook “pressed” Mr. Beaver.  We had a great deal of
+out-door sport and exercise, but nothing was neglected within, and there
+was no ill-humour or misunderstanding among us, and our evenings were so
+delightful that we had at least one good reason for being reluctant to go
+to bed.
+
+We had a few night alarms in the beginning.  On the first night, I was
+knocked up by Jack with a most wonderful ship’s lantern in his hand, like
+the gills of some monster of the deep, who informed me that he “was going
+aloft to the main truck,” to have the weathercock down.  It was a stormy
+night and I remonstrated; but Jack called my attention to its making a
+sound like a cry of despair, and said somebody would be “hailing a ghost”
+presently, if it wasn’t done.  So, up to the top of the house, where I
+could hardly stand for the wind, we went, accompanied by Mr. Beaver; and
+there Jack, lantern and all, with Mr. Beaver after him, swarmed up to the
+top of a cupola, some two dozen feet above the chimneys, and stood upon
+nothing particular, coolly knocking the weathercock off, until they both
+got into such good spirits with the wind and the height, that I thought
+they would never come down.  Another night, they turned out again, and
+had a chimney-cowl off.  Another night, they cut a sobbing and gulping
+water-pipe away.  Another night, they found out something else.  On
+several occasions, they both, in the coolest manner, simultaneously
+dropped out of their respective bedroom windows, hand over hand by their
+counterpanes, to “overhaul” something mysterious in the garden.
+
+The engagement among us was faithfully kept, and nobody revealed
+anything.  All we knew was, if any one’s room were haunted, no one looked
+the worse for it.
+
+
+
+THE GHOST IN MASTER B.’S ROOM.
+
+
+WHEN I established myself in the triangular garret which had gained so
+distinguished a reputation, my thoughts naturally turned to Master B.  My
+speculations about him were uneasy and manifold.  Whether his Christian
+name was Benjamin, Bissextile (from his having been born in Leap Year),
+Bartholomew, or Bill.  Whether the initial letter belonged to his family
+name, and that was Baxter, Black, Brown, Barker, Buggins, Baker, or Bird.
+Whether he was a foundling, and had been baptized B.  Whether he was a
+lion-hearted boy, and B. was short for Briton, or for Bull.  Whether he
+could possibly have been kith and kin to an illustrious lady who
+brightened my own childhood, and had come of the blood of the brilliant
+Mother Bunch?
+
+With these profitless meditations I tormented myself much.  I also
+carried the mysterious letter into the appearance and pursuits of the
+deceased; wondering whether he dressed in Blue, wore Boots (he couldn’t
+have been Bald), was a boy of Brains, liked Books, was good at Bowling,
+had any skill as a Boxer, even in his Buoyant Boyhood Bathed from a
+Bathing-machine at Bognor, Bangor, Bournemouth, Brighton, or Broadstairs,
+like a Bounding Billiard Ball?
+
+So, from the first, I was haunted by the letter B.
+
+It was not long before I remarked that I never by any hazard had a dream
+of Master B., or of anything belonging to him.  But, the instant I awoke
+from sleep, at whatever hour of the night, my thoughts took him up, and
+roamed away, trying to attach his initial letter to something that would
+fit it and keep it quiet.
+
+For six nights, I had been worried thus in Master B.’s room, when I began
+to perceive that things were going wrong.
+
+The first appearance that presented itself was early in the morning when
+it was but just daylight and no more.  I was standing shaving at my
+glass, when I suddenly discovered, to my consternation and amazement,
+that I was shaving—not myself—I am fifty—but a boy.  Apparently Master
+B.!
+
+I trembled and looked over my shoulder; nothing there.  I looked again in
+the glass, and distinctly saw the features and expression of a boy, who
+was shaving, not to get rid of a beard, but to get one.  Extremely
+troubled in my mind, I took a few turns in the room, and went back to the
+looking-glass, resolved to steady my hand and complete the operation in
+which I had been disturbed.  Opening my eyes, which I had shut while
+recovering my firmness, I now met in the glass, looking straight at me,
+the eyes of a young man of four or five and twenty.  Terrified by this
+new ghost, I closed my eyes, and made a strong effort to recover myself.
+Opening them again, I saw, shaving his cheek in the glass, my father, who
+has long been dead.  Nay, I even saw my grandfather too, whom I never did
+see in my life.
+
+Although naturally much affected by these remarkable visitations, I
+determined to keep my secret, until the time agreed upon for the present
+general disclosure.  Agitated by a multitude of curious thoughts, I
+retired to my room, that night, prepared to encounter some new experience
+of a spectral character.  Nor was my preparation needless, for, waking
+from an uneasy sleep at exactly two o’clock in the morning, what were my
+feelings to find that I was sharing my bed with the skeleton of Master
+B.!
+
+I sprang up, and the skeleton sprang up also.  I then heard a plaintive
+voice saying, “Where am I?  What is become of me?” and, looking hard in
+that direction, perceived the ghost of Master B.
+
+The young spectre was dressed in an obsolete fashion: or rather, was not
+so much dressed as put into a case of inferior pepper-and-salt cloth,
+made horrible by means of shining buttons.  I observed that these buttons
+went, in a double row, over each shoulder of the young ghost, and
+appeared to descend his back.  He wore a frill round his neck.  His right
+hand (which I distinctly noticed to be inky) was laid upon his stomach;
+connecting this action with some feeble pimples on his countenance, and
+his general air of nausea, I concluded this ghost to be the ghost of a
+boy who had habitually taken a great deal too much medicine.
+
+“Where am I?” said the little spectre, in a pathetic voice.  “And why was
+I born in the Calomel days, and why did I have all that Calomel given
+me?”
+
+I replied, with sincere earnestness, that upon my soul I couldn’t tell
+him.
+
+“Where is my little sister,” said the ghost, “and where my angelic little
+wife, and where is the boy I went to school with?”
+
+I entreated the phantom to be comforted, and above all things to take
+heart respecting the loss of the boy he went to school with.  I
+represented to him that probably that boy never did, within human
+experience, come out well, when discovered.  I urged that I myself had,
+in later life, turned up several boys whom I went to school with, and
+none of them had at all answered.  I expressed my humble belief that that
+boy never did answer.  I represented that he was a mythic character, a
+delusion, and a snare.  I recounted how, the last time I found him, I
+found him at a dinner party behind a wall of white cravat, with an
+inconclusive opinion on every possible subject, and a power of silent
+boredom absolutely Titanic.  I related how, on the strength of our having
+been together at “Old Doylance’s,” he had asked himself to breakfast with
+me (a social offence of the largest magnitude); how, fanning my weak
+embers of belief in Doylance’s boys, I had let him in; and how, he had
+proved to be a fearful wanderer about the earth, pursuing the race of
+Adam with inexplicable notions concerning the currency, and with a
+proposition that the Bank of England should, on pain of being abolished,
+instantly strike off and circulate, God knows how many thousand millions
+of ten-and-sixpenny notes.
+
+The ghost heard me in silence, and with a fixed stare.  “Barber!” it
+apostrophised me when I had finished.
+
+“Barber?” I repeated—for I am not of that profession.
+
+“Condemned,” said the ghost, “to shave a constant change of
+customers—now, me—now, a young man—now, thyself as thou art—now, thy
+father—now, thy grandfather; condemned, too, to lie down with a skeleton
+every night, and to rise with it every morning—”
+
+(I shuddered on hearing this dismal announcement.)
+
+“Barber!  Pursue me!”
+
+I had felt, even before the words were uttered, that I was under a spell
+to pursue the phantom.  I immediately did so, and was in Master B.’s room
+no longer.
+
+Most people know what long and fatiguing night journeys had been forced
+upon the witches who used to confess, and who, no doubt, told the exact
+truth—particularly as they were always assisted with leading questions,
+and the Torture was always ready.  I asseverate that, during my
+occupation of Master B.’s room, I was taken by the ghost that haunted it,
+on expeditions fully as long and wild as any of those.  Assuredly, I was
+presented to no shabby old man with a goat’s horns and tail (something
+between Pan and an old clothesman), holding conventional receptions, as
+stupid as those of real life and less decent; but, I came upon other
+things which appeared to me to have more meaning.
+
+Confident that I speak the truth and shall be believed, I declare without
+hesitation that I followed the ghost, in the first instance on a
+broom-stick, and afterwards on a rocking-horse.  The very smell of the
+animal’s paint—especially when I brought it out, by making him warm—I am
+ready to swear to.  I followed the ghost, afterwards, in a hackney coach;
+an institution with the peculiar smell of which, the present generation
+is unacquainted, but to which I am again ready to swear as a combination
+of stable, dog with the mange, and very old bellows.  (In this, I appeal
+to previous generations to confirm or refute me.)  I pursued the phantom,
+on a headless donkey: at least, upon a donkey who was so interested in
+the state of his stomach that his head was always down there,
+investigating it; on ponies, expressly born to kick up behind; on
+roundabouts and swings, from fairs; in the first cab—another forgotten
+institution where the fare regularly got into bed, and was tucked up with
+the driver.
+
+Not to trouble you with a detailed account of all my travels in pursuit
+of the ghost of Master B., which were longer and more wonderful than
+those of Sinbad the Sailor, I will confine myself to one experience from
+which you may judge of many.
+
+I was marvellously changed.  I was myself, yet not myself.  I was
+conscious of something within me, which has been the same all through my
+life, and which I have always recognised under all its phases and
+varieties as never altering, and yet I was not the I who had gone to bed
+in Master B.’s room.  I had the smoothest of faces and the shortest of
+legs, and I had taken another creature like myself, also with the
+smoothest of faces and the shortest of legs, behind a door, and was
+confiding to him a proposition of the most astounding nature.
+
+This proposition was, that we should have a Seraglio.
+
+The other creature assented warmly.  He had no notion of respectability,
+neither had I.  It was the custom of the East, it was the way of the good
+Caliph Haroun Alraschid (let me have the corrupted name again for once,
+it is so scented with sweet memories!), the usage was highly laudable,
+and most worthy of imitation.  “O, yes!  Let us,” said the other creature
+with a jump, “have a Seraglio.”
+
+It was not because we entertained the faintest doubts of the meritorious
+character of the Oriental establishment we proposed to import, that we
+perceived it must be kept a secret from Miss Griffin.  It was because we
+knew Miss Griffin to be bereft of human sympathies, and incapable of
+appreciating the greatness of the great Haroun.  Mystery impenetrably
+shrouded from Miss Griffin then, let us entrust it to Miss Bule.
+
+We were ten in Miss Griffin’s establishment by Hampstead Ponds; eight
+ladies and two gentlemen.  Miss Bule, whom I judge to have attained the
+ripe age of eight or nine, took the lead in society.  I opened the
+subject to her in the course of the day, and proposed that she should
+become the Favourite.
+
+Miss Bule, after struggling with the diffidence so natural to, and
+charming in, her adorable sex, expressed herself as flattered by the
+idea, but wished to know how it was proposed to provide for Miss Pipson?
+Miss Bule—who was understood to have vowed towards that young lady, a
+friendship, halves, and no secrets, until death, on the Church Service
+and Lessons complete in two volumes with case and lock—Miss Bule said she
+could not, as the friend of Pipson, disguise from herself, or me, that
+Pipson was not one of the common.
+
+Now, Miss Pipson, having curly hair and blue eyes (which was my idea of
+anything mortal and feminine that was called Fair), I promptly replied
+that I regarded Miss Pipson in the light of a Fair Circassian.
+
+“And what then?” Miss Bule pensively asked.
+
+I replied that she must be inveigled by a Merchant, brought to me veiled,
+and purchased as a slave.
+
+[The other creature had already fallen into the second male place in the
+State, and was set apart for Grand Vizier.  He afterwards resisted this
+disposal of events, but had his hair pulled until he yielded.]
+
+“Shall I not be jealous?” Miss Bule inquired, casting down her eyes.
+
+“Zobeide, no,” I replied; “you will ever be the favourite Sultana; the
+first place in my heart, and on my throne, will be ever yours.”
+
+Miss Bule, upon that assurance, consented to propound the idea to her
+seven beautiful companions.  It occurring to me, in the course of the
+same day, that we knew we could trust a grinning and good-natured soul
+called Tabby, who was the serving drudge of the house, and had no more
+figure than one of the beds, and upon whose face there was always more or
+less black-lead, I slipped into Miss Bule’s hand after supper, a little
+note to that effect; dwelling on the black-lead as being in a manner
+deposited by the finger of Providence, pointing Tabby out for Mesrour,
+the celebrated chief of the Blacks of the Hareem.
+
+There were difficulties in the formation of the desired institution, as
+there are in all combinations.  The other creature showed himself of a
+low character, and, when defeated in aspiring to the throne, pretended to
+have conscientious scruples about prostrating himself before the Caliph;
+wouldn’t call him Commander of the Faithful; spoke of him slightingly and
+inconsistently as a mere “chap;” said he, the other creature, “wouldn’t
+play”—Play!—and was otherwise coarse and offensive.  This meanness of
+disposition was, however, put down by the general indignation of an
+united Seraglio, and I became blessed in the smiles of eight of the
+fairest of the daughters of men.
+
+The smiles could only be bestowed when Miss Griffin was looking another
+way, and only then in a very wary manner, for there was a legend among
+the followers of the Prophet that she saw with a little round ornament in
+the middle of the pattern on the back of her shawl.  But every day after
+dinner, for an hour, we were all together, and then the Favourite and the
+rest of the Royal Hareem competed who should most beguile the leisure of
+the Serene Haroun reposing from the cares of State—which were generally,
+as in most affairs of State, of an arithmetical character, the Commander
+of the Faithful being a fearful boggler at a sum.
+
+On these occasions, the devoted Mesrour, chief of the Blacks of the
+Hareem, was always in attendance (Miss Griffin usually ringing for that
+officer, at the same time, with great vehemence), but never acquitted
+himself in a manner worthy of his historical reputation.  In the first
+place, his bringing a broom into the Divan of the Caliph, even when
+Haroun wore on his shoulders the red robe of anger (Miss Pipson’s
+pelisse), though it might be got over for the moment, was never to be
+quite satisfactorily accounted for.  In the second place, his breaking
+out into grinning exclamations of “Lork you pretties!” was neither
+Eastern nor respectful.  In the third place, when specially instructed to
+say “Bismillah!” he always said “Hallelujah!”  This officer, unlike his
+class, was too good-humoured altogether, kept his mouth open far too
+wide, expressed approbation to an incongruous extent, and even once—it
+was on the occasion of the purchase of the Fair Circassian for five
+hundred thousand purses of gold, and cheap, too—embraced the Slave, the
+Favourite, and the Caliph, all round.  (Parenthetically let me say God
+bless Mesrour, and may there have been sons and daughters on that tender
+bosom, softening many a hard day since!)
+
+Miss Griffin was a model of propriety, and I am at a loss to imagine what
+the feelings of the virtuous woman would have been, if she had known,
+when she paraded us down the Hampstead Road two and two, that she was
+walking with a stately step at the head of Polygamy and Mahomedanism.  I
+believe that a mysterious and terrible joy with which the contemplation
+of Miss Griffin, in this unconscious state, inspired us, and a grim sense
+prevalent among us that there was a dreadful power in our knowledge of
+what Miss Griffin (who knew all things that could be learnt out of book)
+didn’t know, were the main-spring of the preservation of our secret.  It
+was wonderfully kept, but was once upon the verge of self-betrayal.  The
+danger and escape occurred upon a Sunday.  We were all ten ranged in a
+conspicuous part of the gallery at church, with Miss Griffin at our
+head—as we were every Sunday—advertising the establishment in an
+unsecular sort of way—when the description of Solomon in his domestic
+glory happened to be read.  The moment that monarch was thus referred to,
+conscience whispered me, “Thou, too, Haroun!”  The officiating minister
+had a cast in his eye, and it assisted conscience by giving him the
+appearance of reading personally at me.  A crimson blush, attended by a
+fearful perspiration, suffused my features.  The Grand Vizier became more
+dead than alive, and the whole Seraglio reddened as if the sunset of
+Bagdad shone direct upon their lovely faces.  At this portentous time the
+awful Griffin rose, and balefully surveyed the children of Islam.  My own
+impression was, that Church and State had entered into a conspiracy with
+Miss Griffin to expose us, and that we should all be put into white
+sheets, and exhibited in the centre aisle.  But, so Westerly—if I may be
+allowed the expression as opposite to Eastern associations—was Miss
+Griffin’s sense of rectitude, that she merely suspected Apples, and we
+were saved.
+
+I have called the Seraglio, united.  Upon the question, solely, whether
+the Commander of the Faithful durst exercise a right of kissing in that
+sanctuary of the palace, were its peerless inmates divided.  Zobeide
+asserted a counter-right in the Favourite to scratch, and the fair
+Circassian put her face, for refuge, into a green baize bag, originally
+designed for books.  On the other hand, a young antelope of transcendent
+beauty from the fruitful plains of Camden Town (whence she had been
+brought, by traders, in the half-yearly caravan that crossed the
+intermediate desert after the holidays), held more liberal opinions, but
+stipulated for limiting the benefit of them to that dog, and son of a
+dog, the Grand Vizier—who had no rights, and was not in question.  At
+length, the difficulty was compromised by the installation of a very
+youthful slave as Deputy.  She, raised upon a stool, officially received
+upon her cheeks the salutes intended by the gracious Haroun for other
+Sultanas, and was privately rewarded from the coffers of the Ladies of
+the Hareem.
+
+And now it was, at the full height of enjoyment of my bliss, that I
+became heavily troubled.  I began to think of my mother, and what she
+would say to my taking home at Midsummer eight of the most beautiful of
+the daughters of men, but all unexpected.  I thought of the number of
+beds we made up at our house, of my father’s income, and of the baker,
+and my despondency redoubled.  The Seraglio and malicious Vizier,
+divining the cause of their Lord’s unhappiness, did their utmost to
+augment it.  They professed unbounded fidelity, and declared that they
+would live and die with him.  Reduced to the utmost wretchedness by these
+protestations of attachment, I lay awake, for hours at a time, ruminating
+on my frightful lot.  In my despair, I think I might have taken an early
+opportunity of falling on my knees before Miss Griffin, avowing my
+resemblance to Solomon, and praying to be dealt with according to the
+outraged laws of my country, if an unthought-of means of escape had not
+opened before me.
+
+One day, we were out walking, two and two—on which occasion the Vizier
+had his usual instructions to take note of the boy at the turnpike, and
+if he profanely gazed (which he always did) at the beauties of the
+Hareem, to have him bowstrung in the course of the night—and it happened
+that our hearts were veiled in gloom.  An unaccountable action on the
+part of the antelope had plunged the State into disgrace.  That charmer,
+on the representation that the previous day was her birthday, and that
+vast treasures had been sent in a hamper for its celebration (both
+baseless assertions), had secretly but most pressingly invited
+thirty-five neighbouring princes and princesses to a ball and supper:
+with a special stipulation that they were “not to be fetched till
+twelve.”  This wandering of the antelope’s fancy, led to the surprising
+arrival at Miss Griffin’s door, in divers equipages and under various
+escorts, of a great company in full dress, who were deposited on the top
+step in a flush of high expectancy, and who were dismissed in tears.  At
+the beginning of the double knocks attendant on these ceremonies, the
+antelope had retired to a back attic, and bolted herself in; and at every
+new arrival, Miss Griffin had gone so much more and more distracted, that
+at last she had been seen to tear her front.  Ultimate capitulation on
+the part of the offender, had been followed by solitude in the
+linen-closet, bread and water and a lecture to all, of vindictive length,
+in which Miss Griffin had used expressions: Firstly, “I believe you all
+of you knew of it;” Secondly, “Every one of you is as wicked as another;”
+Thirdly, “A pack of little wretches.”
+
+Under these circumstances, we were walking drearily along; and I
+especially, with my Moosulmaun responsibilities heavy on me, was in a
+very low state of mind; when a strange man accosted Miss Griffin, and,
+after walking on at her side for a little while and talking with her,
+looked at me.  Supposing him to be a minion of the law, and that my hour
+was come, I instantly ran away, with the general purpose of making for
+Egypt.
+
+The whole Seraglio cried out, when they saw me making off as fast as my
+legs would carry me (I had an impression that the first turning on the
+left, and round by the public-house, would be the shortest way to the
+Pyramids), Miss Griffin screamed after me, the faithless Vizier ran after
+me, and the boy at the turnpike dodged me into a corner, like a sheep,
+and cut me off.  Nobody scolded me when I was taken and brought back;
+Miss Griffin only said, with a stunning gentleness, This was very
+curious!  Why had I run away when the gentleman looked at me?
+
+If I had had any breath to answer with, I dare say I should have made no
+answer; having no breath, I certainly made none.  Miss Griffin and the
+strange man took me between them, and walked me back to the palace in a
+sort of state; but not at all (as I couldn’t help feeling, with
+astonishment) in culprit state.
+
+When we got there, we went into a room by ourselves, and Miss Griffin
+called in to her assistance, Mesrour, chief of the dusky guards of the
+Hareem.  Mesrour, on being whispered to, began to shed tears.  “Bless
+you, my precious!” said that officer, turning to me; “your Pa’s took
+bitter bad!”
+
+I asked, with a fluttered heart, “Is he very ill?”
+
+“Lord temper the wind to you, my lamb!” said the good Mesrour, kneeling
+down, that I might have a comforting shoulder for my head to rest on,
+“your Pa’s dead!”
+
+Haroun Alraschid took to flight at the words; the Seraglio vanished; from
+that moment, I never again saw one of the eight of the fairest of the
+daughters of men.
+
+I was taken home, and there was Debt at home as well as Death, and we had
+a sale there.  My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a
+Power unknown to me, hazily called “The Trade,” that a brass
+coal-scuttle, a roasting-jack, and a birdcage, were obliged to be put
+into it to make a Lot of it, and then it went for a song.  So I heard
+mentioned, and I wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it
+must have been to sing!
+
+Then, I was sent to a great, cold, bare, school of big boys; where
+everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough;
+where everybody, large and small, was cruel; where the boys knew all
+about the sale, before I got there, and asked me what I had fetched, and
+who had bought me, and hooted at me, “Going, going, gone!”  I never
+whispered in that wretched place that I had been Haroun, or had had a
+Seraglio: for, I knew that if I mentioned my reverses, I should be so
+worried, that I should have to drown myself in the muddy pond near the
+playground, which looked like the beer.
+
+Ah me, ah me!  No other ghost has haunted the boy’s room, my friends,
+since I have occupied it, than the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost
+of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief.  Many a time have I
+pursued the phantom: never with this man’s stride of mine to come up with
+it, never with these man’s hands of mine to touch it, never more to this
+man’s heart of mine to hold it in its purity.  And here you see me
+working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of shaving in
+the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up
+with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRIAL FOR MURDER. {303}
+
+
+I HAVE always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of
+superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own
+psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort.  Almost
+all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no
+parallel or response in a listener’s internal life, and might be
+suspected or laughed at.  A truthful traveller, who should have seen some
+extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no
+fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller, having had some singular
+presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or
+other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he
+would own to it.  To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in
+which such subjects are involved.  We do not habitually communicate our
+experiences of these subjective things as we do our experiences of
+objective creation.  The consequence is, that the general stock of
+experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in
+respect of being miserably imperfect.
+
+In what I am going to relate, I have no intention of setting up,
+opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever.  I know the history of the
+Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a late
+Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have followed
+the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of Spectral Illusion
+occurring within my private circle of friends.  It may be necessary to
+state as to this last, that the sufferer (a lady) was in no degree,
+however distant, related to me.  A mistaken assumption on that head might
+suggest an explanation of a part of my own case,—but only a part,—which
+would be wholly without foundation.  It cannot be referred to my
+inheritance of any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at
+all similar experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience
+since.
+
+It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain murder was
+committed in England, which attracted great attention.  We hear more than
+enough of murderers as they rise in succession to their atrocious
+eminence, and I would bury the memory of this particular brute, if I
+could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail.  I purposely abstain from
+giving any direct clue to the criminal’s individuality.
+
+When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather
+to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly
+hinted that any suspicion fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to
+trial.  As no reference was at that time made to him in the newspapers,
+it is obviously impossible that any description of him can at that time
+have been given in the newspapers.  It is essential that this fact be
+remembered.
+
+Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that
+first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with
+close attention.  I read it twice, if not three times.  The discovery had
+been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a
+flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it,—no word I can find is
+satisfactorily descriptive,—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing
+through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river.
+Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so
+clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence
+of the dead body from the bed.
+
+It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but in
+chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of St. James’s Street.
+It was entirely new to me.  I was in my easy-chair at the moment, and the
+sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver which started the chair
+from its position.  (But it is to be noted that the chair ran easily on
+castors.)  I went to one of the windows (there are two in the room, and
+the room is on the second floor) to refresh my eyes with the moving
+objects down in Piccadilly.  It was a bright autumn morning, and the
+street was sparkling and cheerful.  The wind was high.  As I looked out,
+it brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust
+took, and whirled into a spiral pillar.  As the pillar fell and the
+leaves dispersed, I saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going
+from West to East.  They were one behind the other.  The foremost man
+often looked back over his shoulder.  The second man followed him, at a
+distance of some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised.
+First, the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so
+public a thoroughfare attracted my attention; and next, the more
+remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it.  Both men threaded their
+way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly consistent even
+with the action of walking on a pavement; and no single creature, that I
+could see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them.  In
+passing before my windows, they both stared up at me.  I saw their two
+faces very distinctly, and I knew that I could recognise them anywhere.
+Not that I had consciously noticed anything very remarkable in either
+face, except that the man who went first had an unusually lowering
+appearance, and that the face of the man who followed him was of the
+colour of impure wax.
+
+I am a bachelor, and my valet and his wife constitute my whole
+establishment.  My occupation is in a certain Branch Bank, and I wish
+that my duties as head of a Department were as light as they are
+popularly supposed to be.  They kept me in town that autumn, when I stood
+in need of change.  I was not ill, but I was not well.  My reader is to
+make the most that can be reasonably made of my feeling jaded, having a
+depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being “slightly
+dyspeptic.”  I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of
+health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his
+own from his written answer to my request for it.
+
+As the circumstances of the murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger
+and stronger possession of the public mind, I kept them away from mine by
+knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the
+universal excitement.  But I knew that a verdict of Wilful Murder had
+been found against the suspected murderer, and that he had been committed
+to Newgate for trial.  I also knew that his trial had been postponed over
+one Sessions of the Central Criminal Court, on the ground of general
+prejudice and want of time for the preparation of the defence.  I may
+further have known, but I believe I did not, when, or about when, the
+Sessions to which his trial stood postponed would come on.
+
+My sitting-room, bedroom, and dressing-room, are all on one floor.  With
+the last there is no communication but through the bedroom.  True, there
+is a door in it, once communicating with the staircase; but a part of the
+fitting of my bath has been—and had then been for some years—fixed across
+it.  At the same period, and as a part of the same arrangement,—the door
+had been nailed up and canvased over.
+
+I was standing in my bedroom late one night, giving some directions to my
+servant before he went to bed.  My face was towards the only available
+door of communication with the dressing-room, and it was closed.  My
+servant’s back was towards that door.  While I was speaking to him, I saw
+it open, and a man look in, who very earnestly and mysteriously beckoned
+to me.  That man was the man who had gone second of the two along
+Piccadilly, and whose face was of the colour of impure wax.
+
+The figure, having beckoned, drew back, and closed the door.  With no
+longer pause than was made by my crossing the bedroom, I opened the
+dressing-room door, and looked in.  I had a lighted candle already in my
+hand.  I felt no inward expectation of seeing the figure in the
+dressing-room, and I did not see it there.
+
+Conscious that my servant stood amazed, I turned round to him, and said:
+“Derrick, could you believe that in my cool senses I fancied I saw a —”
+As I there laid my hand upon his breast, with a sudden start he trembled
+violently, and said, “O Lord, yes, sir!  A dead man beckoning!”
+
+Now I do not believe that this John Derrick, my trusty and attached
+servant for more than twenty years, had any impression whatever of having
+seen any such figure, until I touched him.  The change in him was so
+startling, when I touched him, that I fully believe he derived his
+impression in some occult manner from me at that instant.
+
+I bade John Derrick bring some brandy, and I gave him a dram, and was
+glad to take one myself.  Of what had preceded that night’s phenomenon, I
+told him not a single word.  Reflecting on it, I was absolutely certain
+that I had never seen that face before, except on the one occasion in
+Piccadilly.  Comparing its expression when beckoning at the door with its
+expression when it had stared up at me as I stood at my window, I came to
+the conclusion that on the first occasion it had sought to fasten itself
+upon my memory, and that on the second occasion it had made sure of being
+immediately remembered.
+
+I was not very comfortable that night, though I felt a certainty,
+difficult to explain, that the figure would not return.  At daylight I
+fell into a heavy sleep, from which I was awakened by John Derrick’s
+coming to my bedside with a paper in his hand.
+
+This paper, it appeared, had been the subject of an altercation at the
+door between its bearer and my servant.  It was a summons to me to serve
+upon a Jury at the forthcoming Sessions of the Central Criminal Court at
+the Old Bailey.  I had never before been summoned on such a Jury, as John
+Derrick well knew.  He believed—I am not certain at this hour whether
+with reason or otherwise—that that class of Jurors were customarily
+chosen on a lower qualification than mine, and he had at first refused to
+accept the summons.  The man who served it had taken the matter very
+coolly.  He had said that my attendance or non-attendance was nothing to
+him; there the summons was; and I should deal with it at my own peril,
+and not at his.
+
+For a day or two I was undecided whether to respond to this call, or take
+no notice of it.  I was not conscious of the slightest mysterious bias,
+influence, or attraction, one way or other.  Of that I am as strictly
+sure as of every other statement that I make here.  Ultimately I decided,
+as a break in the monotony of my life, that I would go.
+
+The appointed morning was a raw morning in the month of November.  There
+was a dense brown fog in Piccadilly, and it became positively black and
+in the last degree oppressive East of Temple Bar.  I found the passages
+and staircases of the Court-House flaringly lighted with gas, and the
+Court itself similarly illuminated.  I _think_ that, until I was
+conducted by officers into the Old Court and saw its crowded state, I did
+not know that the Murderer was to be tried that day.  I _think_ that,
+until I was so helped into the Old Court with considerable difficulty, I
+did not know into which of the two Courts sitting my summons would take
+me.  But this must not be received as a positive assertion, for I am not
+completely satisfied in my mind on either point.
+
+I took my seat in the place appropriated to Jurors in waiting, and I
+looked about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog and
+breath that was heavy in it.  I noticed the black vapour hanging like a
+murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the stifled sound
+of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the street; also, the
+hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill whistle, or a louder
+song or hail than the rest, occasionally pierced.  Soon afterwards the
+Judges, two in number, entered, and took their seats.  The buzz in the
+Court was awfully hushed.  The direction was given to put the Murderer to
+the bar.  He appeared there.  And in that same instant I recognised in
+him the first of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly.
+
+If my name had been called then, I doubt if I could have answered to it
+audibly.  But it was called about sixth or eighth in the panel, and I was
+by that time able to say, “Here!”  Now, observe.  As I stepped into the
+box, the prisoner, who had been looking on attentively, but with no sign
+of concern, became violently agitated, and beckoned to his attorney.  The
+prisoner’s wish to challenge me was so manifest, that it occasioned a
+pause, during which the attorney, with his hand upon the dock, whispered
+with his client, and shook his head.  I afterwards had it from that
+gentleman, that the prisoner’s first affrighted words to him were, “_At
+all hazards_, _challenge that man_!”  But that, as he would give no
+reason for it, and admitted that he had not even known my name until he
+heard it called and I appeared, it was not done.
+
+Both on the ground already explained, that I wish to avoid reviving the
+unwholesome memory of that Murderer, and also because a detailed account
+of his long trial is by no means indispensable to my narrative, I shall
+confine myself closely to such incidents in the ten days and nights
+during which we, the Jury, were kept together, as directly bear on my own
+curious personal experience.  It is in that, and not in the Murderer,
+that I seek to interest my reader.  It is to that, and not to a page of
+the Newgate Calendar, that I beg attention.
+
+I was chosen Foreman of the Jury.  On the second morning of the trial,
+after evidence had been taken for two hours (I heard the church clocks
+strike), happening to cast my eyes over my brother jurymen, I found an
+inexplicable difficulty in counting them.  I counted them several times,
+yet always with the same difficulty.  In short, I made them one too many.
+
+I touched the brother jurymen whose place was next me, and I whispered to
+him, “Oblige me by counting us.”  He looked surprised by the request, but
+turned his head and counted. “Why,” says he, suddenly, “we are Thirt—;
+but no, it’s not possible.  No.  We are twelve.”
+
+According to my counting that day, we were always right in detail, but in
+the gross we were always one too many.  There was no appearance—no
+figure—to account for it; but I had now an inward foreshadowing of the
+figure that was surely coming.
+
+The Jury were housed at the London Tavern.  We all slept in one large
+room on separate tables, and we were constantly in the charge and under
+the eye of the officer sworn to hold us in safe-keeping.  I see no reason
+for suppressing the real name of that officer.  He was intelligent,
+highly polite, and obliging, and (I was glad to hear) much respected in
+the City.  He had an agreeable presence, good eyes, enviable black
+whiskers, and a fine sonorous voice.  His name was Mr. Harker.
+
+When we turned into our twelve beds at night, Mr. Harker’s bed was drawn
+across the door.  On the night of the second day, not being disposed to
+lie down, and seeing Mr. Harker sitting on his bed, I went and sat beside
+him, and offered him a pinch of snuff.  As Mr. Harker’s hand touched mine
+in taking it from my box, a peculiar shiver crossed him, and he said,
+“Who is this?”
+
+Following Mr. Harker’s eyes, and looking along the room, I saw again the
+figure I expected,—the second of the two men who had gone down
+Piccadilly.  I rose, and advanced a few steps; then stopped, and looked
+round at Mr. Harker.  He was quite unconcerned, laughed, and said in a
+pleasant way, “I thought for a moment we had a thirteenth juryman,
+without a bed.  But I see it is the moonlight.”
+
+Making no revelation to Mr. Harker, but inviting him to take a walk with
+me to the end of the room, I watched what the figure did.  It stood for a
+few moments by the bedside of each of my eleven brother jurymen, close to
+the pillow.  It always went to the right-hand side of the bed, and always
+passed out crossing the foot of the next bed.  It seemed, from the action
+of the head, merely to look down pensively at each recumbent figure.  It
+took no notice of me, or of my bed, which was that nearest to Mr.
+Harker’s.  It seemed to go out where the moonlight came in, through a
+high window, as by an aërial flight of stairs.
+
+Next morning at breakfast, it appeared that everybody present had dreamed
+of the murdered man last night, except myself and Mr. Harker.
+
+I now felt as convinced that the second man who had gone down Piccadilly
+was the murdered man (so to speak), as if it had been borne into my
+comprehension by his immediate testimony.  But even this took place, and
+in a manner for which I was not at all prepared.
+
+On the fifth day of the trial, when the case for the prosecution was
+drawing to a close, a miniature of the murdered man, missing from his
+bedroom upon the discovery of the deed, and afterwards found in a
+hiding-place where the Murderer had been seen digging, was put in
+evidence.  Having been identified by the witness under examination, it
+was handed up to the Bench, and thence handed down to be inspected by the
+Jury.  As an officer in a black gown was making his way with it across to
+me, the figure of the second man who had gone down Piccadilly impetuously
+started from the crowd, caught the miniature from the officer, and gave
+it to me with his own hands, at the same time saying, in a low and hollow
+tone,—before I saw the miniature, which was in a locket,—“_I was younger
+then_, _and my face was not then drained of blood_.”  It also came
+between me and the brother juryman to whom I would have given the
+miniature, and between him and the brother juryman to whom he would have
+given it, and so passed it on through the whole of our number, and back
+into my possession.  Not one of them, however, detected this.
+
+At table, and generally when we were shut up together in Mr. Harker’s
+custody, we had from the first naturally discussed the day’s proceedings
+a good deal.  On that fifth day, the case for the prosecution being
+closed, and we having that side of the question in a completed shape
+before us, our discussion was more animated and serious.  Among our
+number was a vestryman,—the densest idiot I have ever seen at large,—who
+met the plainest evidence with the most preposterous objections, and who
+was sided with by two flabby parochial parasites; all the three
+impanelled from a district so delivered over to Fever that they ought to
+have been upon their own trial for five hundred Murders.  When these
+mischievous blockheads were at their loudest, which was towards midnight,
+while some of us were already preparing for bed, I again saw the murdered
+man.  He stood grimly behind them, beckoning to me.  On my going towards
+them, and striking into the conversation, he immediately retired.  This
+was the beginning of a separate series of appearances, confined to that
+long room in which we were confined.  Whenever a knot of my brother
+jurymen laid their heads together, I saw the head of the murdered man
+among theirs.  Whenever their comparison of notes was going against him,
+he would solemnly and irresistibly beckon to me.
+
+It will be borne in mind that down to the production of the miniature, on
+the fifth day of the trial, I had never seen the Appearance in Court.
+Three changes occurred now that we entered on the case for the defence.
+Two of them I will mention together, first.  The figure was now in Court
+continually, and it never there addressed itself to me, but always to the
+person who was speaking at the time.  For instance: the throat of the
+murdered man had been cut straight across.  In the opening speech for the
+defence, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own
+throat.  At that very moment, the figure, with its throat in the dreadful
+condition referred to (this it had concealed before), stood at the
+speaker’s elbow, motioning across and across its windpipe, now with the
+right hand, now with the left, vigorously suggesting to the speaker
+himself the impossibility of such a wound having been self-inflicted by
+either hand.  For another instance: a witness to character, a woman,
+deposed to the prisoner’s being the most amiable of mankind.  The figure
+at that instant stood on the floor before her, looking her full in the
+face, and pointing out the prisoner’s evil countenance with an extended
+arm and an outstretched finger.
+
+The third change now to be added impressed me strongly as the most marked
+and striking of all.  I do not theorise upon it; I accurately state it,
+and there leave it.  Although the Appearance was not itself perceived by
+those whom it addressed, its coming close to such persons was invariably
+attended by some trepidation or disturbance on their part.  It seemed to
+me as if it were prevented, by laws to which I was not amenable, from
+fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if it could invisibly,
+dumbly, and darkly overshadow their minds.  When the leading counsel for
+the defence suggested that hypothesis of suicide, and the figure stood at
+the learned gentleman’s elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat,
+it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a few
+seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his forehead with
+his handkerchief, and turned extremely pale.  When the witness to
+character was confronted by the Appearance, her eyes most certainly did
+follow the direction of its pointed finger, and rest in great hesitation
+and trouble upon the prisoner’s face.  Two additional illustrations will
+suffice.  On the eighth day of the trial, after the pause which was every
+day made early in the afternoon for a few minutes’ rest and refreshment,
+I came back into Court with the rest of the Jury some little time before
+the return of the Judges.  Standing up in the box and looking about me, I
+thought the figure was not there, until, chancing to raise my eyes to the
+gallery, I saw it bending forward, and leaning over a very decent woman,
+as if to assure itself whether the Judges had resumed their seats or not.
+Immediately afterwards that woman screamed, fainted, and was carried out.
+So with the venerable, sagacious, and patient Judge who conducted the
+trial.  When the case was over, and he settled himself and his papers to
+sum up, the murdered man, entering by the Judges’ door, advanced to his
+Lordship’s desk, and looked eagerly over his shoulder at the pages of his
+notes which he was turning.  A change came over his Lordship’s face; his
+hand stopped; the peculiar shiver, that I knew so well, passed over him;
+he faltered, “Excuse me, gentlemen, for a few moments.  I am somewhat
+oppressed by the vitiated air;” and did not recover until he had drunk a
+glass of water.
+
+Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days,—the same
+Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same
+lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer rising to the
+roof of the court, the same scratching of the Judge’s pen, the same
+ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at the same hour when
+there had been any natural light of day, the same foggy curtain outside
+the great windows when it was foggy, the same rain pattering and dripping
+when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys and prisoner day after
+day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and unlocking the same
+heavy doors,—through all the wearisome monotony which made me feel as if
+I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast period of time, and Piccadilly
+had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one
+trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less
+distinct than anybody else.  I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I
+never once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered
+man look at the Murderer.  Again and again I wondered, “Why does he not?”
+But he never did.
+
+Nor did he look at me, after the production of the miniature, until the
+last closing minutes of the trial arrived.  We retired to consider, at
+seven minutes before ten at night.  The idiotic vestryman and his two
+parochial parasites gave us so much trouble that we twice returned into
+Court to beg to have certain extracts from the Judge’s notes re-read.
+Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I
+believe, had any one in the Court; the dunder-headed triumvirate, having
+no idea but obstruction, disputed them for that very reason.  At length
+we prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes
+past twelve.
+
+The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on
+the other side of the Court.  As I took my place, his eyes rested on me
+with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great gray
+veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and
+whole form.  As I gave in our verdict, “Guilty,” the veil collapsed, all
+was gone, and his place was empty.
+
+The Murderer, being asked by the Judge, according to usage, whether he
+had anything to say before sentence of Death should be passed upon him,
+indistinctly muttered something which was described in the leading
+newspapers of the following day as “a few rambling, incoherent, and
+half-audible words, in which he was understood to complain that he had
+not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of the Jury was prepossessed
+against him.”  The remarkable declaration that he really made was this:
+“_My Lord_, _I knew I was a doomed man_, _when the Foreman of my Jury
+came into the box_.  _My Lord_, _I knew he would never let me off_,
+_because_, _before I was taken_, _he somehow got to my bedside in the
+night_, _woke me_, _and put a rope round my neck_.”
+
+
+
+
+THE SIGNAL-MAN. {312}
+
+
+“HALLOA!  Below there!”
+
+When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of
+his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole.  One would
+have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not
+have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up
+to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he
+turned himself about, and looked down the Line.  There was something
+remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my
+life what.  But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice,
+even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep
+trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry
+sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.
+
+“Halloa!  Below!”
+
+From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising
+his eyes, saw my figure high above him.
+
+“Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?”
+
+He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without
+pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question.  Just then
+there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into
+a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back,
+as though it had force to draw me down.  When such vapour as rose to my
+height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over
+the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had
+shown while the train went by.
+
+I repeated my inquiry.  After a pause, during which he seemed to regard
+me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a
+point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant.  I called
+down to him, “All right!” and made for that point.  There, by dint of
+looking closely about me, I found a rough zigzag descending path notched
+out, which I followed.
+
+The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate.  It was made
+through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went down.
+For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me time to recall
+a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had pointed out
+the path.
+
+When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent to see him again, I
+saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by which the train
+had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were waiting for me to appear.
+He had his left hand at his chin, and that left elbow rested on his right
+hand, crossed over his breast.  His attitude was one of such expectation
+and watchfulness that I stopped a moment, wondering at it.
+
+I resumed my downward way, and stepping out upon the level of the
+railroad, and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark, sallow man,
+with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows.  His post was in as solitary
+and dismal a place as ever I saw.  On either side, a dripping-wet wall of
+jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one
+way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter
+perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and
+the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture
+there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air.  So little
+sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly
+smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to
+me, as if I had left the natural world.
+
+Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him.  Not
+even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step, and
+lifted his hand.
+
+This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my
+attention when I looked down from up yonder.  A visitor was a rarity, I
+should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped?  In me, he merely saw a
+man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who,
+being at last set free, had a newly-awakened interest in these great
+works.  To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the
+terms I used; for, besides that I am not happy in opening any
+conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me.
+
+He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel’s
+mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and
+then looked at me.
+
+That light was part of his charge?  Was it not?
+
+He answered in a low voice,—“Don’t you know it is?”
+
+The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and
+the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man.  I have speculated
+since, whether there may have been infection in his mind.
+
+In my turn, I stepped back.  But in making the action, I detected in his
+eyes some latent fear of me.  This put the monstrous thought to flight.
+
+“You look at me,” I said, forcing a smile, “as if you had a dread of me.”
+
+“I was doubtful,” he returned, “whether I had seen you before.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+He pointed to the red light he had looked at.
+
+“There?” I said.
+
+Intently watchful of me, he replied (but without sound), “Yes.”
+
+“My good fellow, what should I do there?  However, be that as it may, I
+never was there, you may swear.”
+
+“I think I may,” he rejoined.  “Yes; I am sure I may.”
+
+His manner cleared, like my own.  He replied to my remarks with
+readiness, and in well-chosen words.  Had he much to do there?  Yes; that
+was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness and
+watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work—manual
+labour—he had next to none.  To change that signal, to trim those lights,
+and to turn this iron handle now and then, was all he had to do under
+that head.  Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed
+to make so much, he could only say that the routine of his life had
+shaped itself into that form, and he had grown used to it.  He had taught
+himself a language down here,—if only to know it by sight, and to have
+formed his own crude ideas of its pronunciation, could be called learning
+it.  He had also worked at fractions and decimals, and tried a little
+algebra; but he was, and had been as a boy, a poor hand at figures.  Was
+it necessary for him when on duty always to remain in that channel of
+damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those
+high stone walls?  Why, that depended upon times and circumstances.
+Under some conditions there would be less upon the Line than under
+others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night.
+In bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above
+these lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his
+electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety,
+the relief was less than I would suppose.
+
+He took me into his box, where there was a fire, a desk for an official
+book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic instrument
+with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of which he had
+spoken.  On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been
+well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated
+above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in
+such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that
+he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that
+last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or
+less, in any great railway staff.  He had been, when young (if I could
+believe it, sitting in that hut,—he scarcely could), a student of natural
+philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his
+opportunities, gone down, and never risen again.  He had no complaint to
+offer about that.  He had made his bed, and he lay upon it.  It was far
+too late to make another.
+
+                        [Picture: The signal-man]
+
+All that I have here condensed he said in a quiet manner, with his grave,
+dark regards divided between me and the fire.  He threw in the word,
+“Sir,” from time to time, and especially when he referred to his
+youth,—as though to request me to understand that he claimed to be
+nothing but what I found him.  He was several times interrupted by the
+little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies.  Once he had
+to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train passed, and make
+some verbal communication to the driver.  In the discharge of his duties,
+I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his
+discourse at a syllable, and remaining silent until what he had to do was
+done.
+
+In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of men to
+be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that while he was
+speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen colour, turned his face
+towards the little bell when it did NOT ring, opened the door of the hut
+(which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy damp), and looked out
+towards the red light near the mouth of the tunnel.  On both of those
+occasions, he came back to the fire with the inexplicable air upon him
+which I had remarked, without being able to define, when we were so far
+asunder.
+
+Said I, when I rose to leave him, “You almost make me think that I have
+met with a contented man.”
+
+(I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.)
+
+“I believe I used to be so,” he rejoined, in the low voice in which he
+had first spoken; “but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled.”
+
+He would have recalled the words if he could.  He had said them, however,
+and I took them up quickly.
+
+“With what?  What is your trouble?”
+
+“It is very difficult to impart, sir.  It is very, very difficult to
+speak of.  If ever you make me another visit, I will try to tell you.”
+
+“But I expressly intend to make you another visit.  Say, when shall it
+be?”
+
+“I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to-morrow
+night, sir.”
+
+“I will come at eleven.”
+
+He thanked me, and went out at the door with me.  “I’ll show my white
+light, sir,” he said, in his peculiar low voice, “till you have found the
+way up.  When you have found it, don’t call out!  And when you are at the
+top, don’t call out!”
+
+His manner seemed to make the place strike colder to me, but I said no
+more than, “Very well.”
+
+“And when you come down to-morrow night, don’t call out!  Let me ask you
+a parting question.  What made you cry, ‘Halloa!  Below there!’
+to-night?”
+
+“Heaven knows,” said I.  “I cried something to that effect—”
+
+“Not to that effect, sir.  Those were the very words.  I know them well.”
+
+“Admit those were the very words.  I said them, no doubt, because I saw
+you below.”
+
+“For no other reason?”
+
+“What other reason could I possibly have?”
+
+“You had no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural
+way?”
+
+“No.”
+
+He wished me good-night, and held up his light.  I walked by the side of
+the down Line of rails (with a very disagreeable sensation of a train
+coming behind me) until I found the path.  It was easier to mount than to
+descend, and I got back to my inn without any adventure.
+
+Punctual to my appointment, I placed my foot on the first notch of the
+zigzag next night, as the distant clocks were striking eleven.  He was
+waiting for me at the bottom, with his white light on.  “I have not
+called out,” I said, when we came close together; “may I speak now?”  “By
+all means, sir.”  “Good-night, then, and here’s my hand.”  “Good-night,
+sir, and here’s mine.”  With that we walked side by side to his box,
+entered it, closed the door, and sat down by the fire.
+
+“I have made up my mind, sir,” he began, bending forward as soon as we
+were seated, and speaking in a tone but a little above a whisper, “that
+you shall not have to ask me twice what troubles me.  I took you for some
+one else yesterday evening.  That troubles me.”
+
+“That mistake?”
+
+“No.  That some one else.”
+
+“Who is it?”
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+“Like me?”
+
+“I don’t know.  I never saw the face.  The left arm is across the face,
+and the right arm is waved,—violently waved.  This way.”
+
+I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm
+gesticulating, with the utmost passion and vehemence, “For God’s sake,
+clear the way!”
+
+“One moonlight night,” said the man, “I was sitting here, when I heard a
+voice cry, ‘Halloa!  Below there!’  I started up, looked from that door,
+and saw this Some one else standing by the red light near the tunnel,
+waving as I just now showed you.  The voice seemed hoarse with shouting,
+and it cried, ‘Look out!  Look out!’  And then again, ‘Halloa!  Below
+there!  Look out!’  I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran
+towards the figure, calling, ‘What’s wrong?  What has happened?  Where?’
+It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel.  I advanced so close
+upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes.  I ran
+right up at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away,
+when it was gone.”
+
+“Into the tunnel?” said I.
+
+“No.  I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards.  I stopped, and held
+my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and
+saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the
+arch.  I ran out again faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal
+abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light
+with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop
+of it, and I came down again, and ran back here.  I telegraphed both
+ways, ‘An alarm has been given.  Is anything wrong?’  The answer came
+back, both ways, ‘All well.’”
+
+Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I
+showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of
+sight; and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate
+nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have
+often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature
+of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon
+themselves.  “As to an imaginary cry,” said I, “do but listen for a
+moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to
+the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires.”
+
+That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for a
+while, and he ought to know something of the wind and the wires,—he who
+so often passed long winter nights there, alone and watching.  But he
+would beg to remark that he had not finished.
+
+I asked his pardon, and he slowly added these words, touching my arm,—
+
+“Within six hours after the Appearance, the memorable accident on this
+Line happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded were brought
+along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had stood.”
+
+A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it.  It
+was not to be denied, I rejoined, that this was a remarkable coincidence,
+calculated deeply to impress his mind.  But it was unquestionable that
+remarkable coincidences did continually occur, and they must be taken
+into account in dealing with such a subject.  Though to be sure I must
+admit, I added (for I thought I saw that he was going to bring the
+objection to bear upon me), men of common sense did not allow much for
+coincidences in making the ordinary calculations of life.
+
+He again begged to remark that he had not finished.
+
+I again begged his pardon for being betrayed into interruptions.
+
+“This,” he said, again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing over his
+shoulder with hollow eyes, “was just a year ago.  Six or seven months
+passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one
+morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at the door, looked towards
+the red light, and saw the spectre again.”  He stopped, with a fixed look
+at me.
+
+“Did it cry out?”
+
+“No.  It was silent.”
+
+“Did it wave its arm?”
+
+“No.  It leaned against the shaft of the light, with both hands before
+the face.  Like this.”
+
+Once more I followed his action with my eyes.  It was an action of
+mourning.  I have seen such an attitude in stone figures on tombs.
+
+“Did you go up to it?”
+
+“I came in and sat down, partly to collect my thoughts, partly because it
+had turned me faint.  When I went to the door again, daylight was above
+me, and the ghost was gone.”
+
+“But nothing followed?  Nothing came of this?”
+
+He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice giving a
+ghastly nod each time:—
+
+“That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a
+carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and
+heads, and something waved.  I saw it just in time to signal the driver,
+Stop!  He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here
+a hundred and fifty yards or more.  I ran after it, and, as I went along,
+heard terrible screams and cries.  A beautiful young lady had died
+instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and
+laid down on this floor between us.”
+
+Involuntarily I pushed my chair back, as I looked from the boards at
+which he pointed to himself.
+
+“True, sir.  True.  Precisely as it happened, so I tell it you.”
+
+I could think of nothing to say, to any purpose, and my mouth was very
+dry.  The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting
+wail.
+
+He resumed.  “Now, sir, mark this, and judge how my mind is troubled.
+The spectre came back a week ago.  Ever since, it has been there, now and
+again, by fits and starts.”
+
+“At the light?”
+
+“At the Danger-light.”
+
+“What does it seem to do?”
+
+He repeated, if possible with increased passion and vehemence, that
+former gesticulation of, “For God’s sake, clear the way!”
+
+Then he went on.  “I have no peace or rest for it.  It calls to me, for
+many minutes together, in an agonised manner, ‘Below there!  Look out!
+Look out!’  It stands waving to me.  It rings my little bell—”
+
+I caught at that.  “Did it ring your bell yesterday evening when I was
+here, and you went to the door?”
+
+“Twice.”
+
+“Why, see,” said I, “how your imagination misleads you.  My eyes were on
+the bell, and my ears were open to the bell, and if I am a living man, it
+did NOT ring at those times.  No, nor at any other time, except when it
+was rung in the natural course of physical things by the station
+communicating with you.”
+
+He shook his head. “I have never made a mistake as to that yet, sir.  I
+have never confused the spectre’s ring with the man’s.  The ghost’s ring
+is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and
+I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye.  I don’t wonder that
+you failed to hear it.  But _I_ heard it.”
+
+“And did the spectre seem to be there, when you looked out?”
+
+“It WAS there.”
+
+“Both times?”
+
+He repeated firmly: “Both times.”
+
+“Will you come to the door with me, and look for it now?”
+
+He bit his under lip as though he were somewhat unwilling, but arose.  I
+opened the door, and stood on the step, while he stood in the doorway.
+There was the Danger-light.  There was the dismal mouth of the tunnel.
+There were the high, wet stone walls of the cutting.  There were the
+stars above them.
+
+“Do you see it?” I asked him, taking particular note of his face.  His
+eyes were prominent and strained, but not very much more so, perhaps,
+than my own had been when I had directed them earnestly towards the same
+spot.
+
+“No,” he answered.  “It is not there.”
+
+“Agreed,” said I.
+
+We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats.  I was thinking
+how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when he
+took up the conversation in such a matter-of-course way, so assuming that
+there could be no serious question of fact between us, that I felt myself
+placed in the weakest of positions.
+
+“By this time you will fully understand, sir,” he said, “that what
+troubles me so dreadfully is the question, What does the spectre mean?”
+
+I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.
+
+“What is its warning against?” he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the
+fire, and only by times turning them on me.  “What is the danger?  Where
+is the danger?  There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line.  Some
+dreadful calamity will happen.  It is not to be doubted this third time,
+after what has gone before.  But surely this is a cruel haunting of me.
+What can I do?”
+
+He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated
+forehead.
+
+“If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no
+reason for it,” he went on, wiping the palms of his hands.  “I should get
+into trouble, and do no good.  They would think I was mad.  This is the
+way it would work,—Message: ‘Danger!  Take care!’  Answer: ‘What Danger?
+Where?’  Message: ‘Don’t know.  But, for God’s sake, take care!’  They
+would displace me.  What else could they do?”
+
+His pain of mind was most pitiable to see.  It was the mental torture of
+a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible
+responsibility involving life.
+
+“When it first stood under the Danger-light,” he went on, putting his
+dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and
+across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, “why not tell me
+where that accident was to happen,—if it must happen?  Why not tell me
+how it could be averted,—if it could have been averted?  When on its
+second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead, ‘She is going to
+die.  Let them keep her at home’?  If it came, on those two occasions,
+only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the
+third, why not warn me plainly now?  And I, Lord help me!  A mere poor
+signal-man on this solitary station!  Why not go to somebody with credit
+to be believed, and power to act?”
+
+When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as well
+as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose
+his mind.  Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality
+between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his
+duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he
+understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding
+Appearances.  In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt
+to reason him out of his conviction.  He became calm; the occupations
+incidental to his post as the night advanced began to make larger demands
+on his attention: and I left him at two in the morning.  I had offered to
+stay through the night, but he would not hear of it.
+
+That I more than once looked back at the red light as I ascended the
+pathway, that I did not like the red light, and that I should have slept
+but poorly if my bed had been under it, I see no reason to conceal.  Nor
+did I like the two sequences of the accident and the dead girl.  I see no
+reason to conceal that either.
+
+But what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration how ought I to
+act, having become the recipient of this disclosure?  I had proved the
+man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking, and exact; but how long
+might he remain so, in his state of mind?  Though in a subordinate
+position, still he held a most important trust, and would I (for
+instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of his continuing to
+execute it with precision?
+
+Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something treacherous in
+my communicating what he had told me to his superiors in the Company,
+without first being plain with himself and proposing a middle course to
+him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany him (otherwise keeping
+his secret for the present) to the wisest medical practitioner we could
+hear of in those parts, and to take his opinion.  A change in his time of
+duty would come round next night, he had apprised me, and he would be off
+an hour or two after sunrise, and on again soon after sunset.  I had
+appointed to return accordingly.
+
+Next evening was a lovely evening, and I walked out early to enjoy it.
+The sun was not yet quite down when I traversed the field-path near the
+top of the deep cutting.  I would extend my walk for an hour, I said to
+myself, half an hour on and half an hour back, and it would then be time
+to go to my signal-man’s box.
+
+Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically
+looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him.  I cannot
+describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the
+tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his
+eyes, passionately waving his right arm.
+
+The nameless horror that oppressed me passed in a moment, for in a moment
+I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was
+a little group of other men, standing at a short distance, to whom he
+seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made.  The Danger-light was not
+yet lighted.  Against its shaft, a little low hut, entirely new to me,
+had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin.  It looked no bigger
+than a bed.
+
+With an irresistible sense that something was wrong,—with a flashing
+self-reproachful fear that fatal mischief had come of my leaving the man
+there, and causing no one to be sent to overlook or correct what he
+did,—I descended the notched path with all the speed I could make.
+
+“What is the matter?” I asked the men.
+
+“Signal-man killed this morning, sir.”
+
+“Not the man belonging to that box?”
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Not the man I know?”
+
+“You will recognise him, sir, if you knew him,” said the man who spoke
+for the others, solemnly uncovering his own head, and raising an end of
+the tarpaulin, “for his face is quite composed.”
+
+“O, how did this happen, how did this happen?” I asked, turning from one
+to another as the hut closed in again.
+
+“He was cut down by an engine, sir.  No man in England knew his work
+better.  But somehow he was not clear of the outer rail.  It was just at
+broad day.  He had struck the light, and had the lamp in his hand.  As
+the engine came out of the tunnel, his back was towards her, and she cut
+him down.  That man drove her, and was showing how it happened.  Show the
+gentleman, Tom.”
+
+The man, who wore a rough dark dress, stepped back to his former place at
+the mouth of the tunnel.
+
+“Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir,” he said, “I saw him at the
+end, like as if I saw him down a perspective-glass.  There was no time to
+check speed, and I knew him to be very careful.  As he didn’t seem to
+take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon
+him, and called to him as loud as I could call.”
+
+“What did you say?”
+
+“I said, ‘Below there!  Look out!  Look out!  For God’s sake, clear the
+way!’”
+
+I started.
+
+“Ah! it was a dreadful time, sir.  I never left off calling to him.  I
+put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to the last;
+but it was no use.”
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious
+circumstances more than on any other, I may, in closing it, point out the
+coincidence that the warning of the Engine-Driver included, not only the
+words which the unfortunate Signal-man had repeated to me as haunting
+him, but also the words which I myself—not he—had attached, and that only
+in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES.
+
+
+{121}  The original has eight chapters, which will be found in _All the
+Year Round_, vol. ii., old series; but those not printed here, excepting
+a page at the close, were not written by Mr. Dickens.
+
+{303}  This paper appeared as a chapter “To be taken with a Grain of
+Salt,” in Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions.
+
+{312}  This story appeared as a portion of the Christmas number for 1866,
+“Mugby Junction,” of which other portions follow in “Barbox Brothers” and
+“The Boy at Mugby.”
+
+
+
+
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