s us commonly,
but what we conceive. A principle that reaches a good way if I am not
mistaken. I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the Little
Gentleman's chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get
to sleep, it is not because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or
mysterious way. The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head
was one that was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile
of gold; it was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of
sweating gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews
odious and afford a pretext for plundering them. As for the sound like a
woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for, in
the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly, he may
have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what they call
the vox humana stop. If he moves his bed round to get away from the
window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very frightful in 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 a