n that simple
operation. Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in some such
simple way. And, yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I woke up the
other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and then
footsteps, and then the dragging sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite
sure,--I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters did in
Keats's terrible poem of "Lamia."

There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
awake and get listening for sounds. Just keep your ears open any time
after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark
night. What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will
hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error. All the dead things
seem to be alive. Crack! That is the old chest of drawers; you never
hear it crack in the daytime. Creak! There's a door ajar; you know you
shut them all.

Where can that latch be that rattles so? Is anybody trying it softly?
or, worse than any body, is----? (Cold shiver.) Then a sudden gust that
jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does not seem to be any wind
about that it belongs to. When it stops, you hear the worms boring in
the powdery beams overhead. Then steps outside,--a stray animal, no
doubt. All right,--but a gentle moisture breaks out all over you; and
then something like a whistle or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps;
that accounts for the rustling that just made your heart roll over and
tumble about, so that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a
part of your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
over, very likely----Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are damp and
cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so that the
death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!

No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings. Who
ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that
Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and owls, and
crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny
nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead
fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach? Our old mother Nature
has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress
of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops; but when she follows us
up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, eve