mor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in my
cheeks. The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded gradually
from my imagination, and I returned to the still perplexing mysteries of
my little neighbor's chamber.

All was still there now. No plaintive sounds, no monotonous murmurs,
no shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if something
or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was something to be
hidden in those dark mahogany presses. Is there an inner apartment that
I have not seen? The way in which the house is built might admit of it.
As I thought it over, I at once imagined a Bluebeard's chamber. Suppose,
for instance, that the narrow bookshelves to the right are really only a
masked door, such as we remember leading to the private study of one
of our most distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his
stately library to that little silent cell. If this were lighted
from above, a person or persons might pass their days there without
attracting attention from the household, and wander where they pleased
at night,--to Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I said to
myself, laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head. There is
no logic in superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams. A she-ghost
wouldn't want an inner chamber to herself. A live woman, with a valuable
soprano voice, wouldn't start off at night to sprain her ankles over the
old graves of the North-End cemetery.

It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this page
in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and anserine
unchristian names, because I had these fancies running through my
head. I don't care much for your abuse. The question is not, what it
is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he actually does think
about, in the dark, and when he is alone, and his whole body seems but
one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the phosphorescent flashes of
his own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in the direction of the last
strange noise,--what he actually does think about, as he lies and
recalls all the wild stories his head is full of, his fancy hinting the
most alarming conjectures to account for the simplest facts about him,
his common-sense laughing them to scorn the next minute, but his mind
still returning to them, under one shape or another, until he gets very
nervous and foolish, and remembers how pleasant it used to be to have
his mother c