THREE GHOST STORIES

BY
CHARLES DICKENS
 Three Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens.

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CONTENTS
The Haunted House
The Trial For Murder
The Signal-Man
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THE HAUNTED HOUSE

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
 2

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.”
 3

“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
 4

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.

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
 5

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.”
 6

“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.”

 7

“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
 8

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.

 9

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
 10

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.
 11

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
 12

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.

 13

“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
 14

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
 15

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
 16

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
 17

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
 18

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
 19

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.
 20

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
 21

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—
 22

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.
 23

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
 24

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
 25

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!)
 26

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),
 27

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
 28

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!”
 29

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.
 30

THE TRIAL FOR MURDER

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
 31

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
 32

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
 33

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.
 34

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
 35

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.
 36

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
 37

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
 38

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
 39

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
 40

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
 41

somehow got to my bedside in the night, woke me, and put a rope round my
neck.”
 42

THE SIGNAL-MAN

“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.
 43

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.
 44

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
 45

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.

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
 46

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 NOTring, 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!”
 47

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?”
 48

“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
 49

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.”

 50

“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?”

 51

“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
 52

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?”
 53

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
 54

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.
 55

“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.”
 56

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.

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