a wild, black kind of night, and the weirdness of it showed up
as I passed from light to light or crossed the mouths of dim alleys
leading Heaven knows to what infernal dens of mystery and crime even in
this latter-day city of ours. The moon was up as far as the church
steeples; large vapoury clouds scudding across the sky between us and
her, and a strong, gusty wind, laden with big raindrops snarled angrily
round corners and sighed in the parapets like strange voices talking
about things not of human interest.

It made no difference to me, of course. New York in this year of grace
is not the place for the supernatural be the time never so fit for
witch-riding and the night wind in the chimney-stacks sound never so
much like the last gurgling cries of throttled men. No! the world was
very matter-of-fact, and particularly so to me, a poor younger son with
five dollars in my purse by way of fortune, a packet of unpaid bills in
my breastpocket, and round my neck a locket with a portrait therein of
that dear buxom, freckled, stub-nosed girl away in a little southern
seaport town whom I thought I loved with a magnificent affection.
Gods! I had not even touched the fringe of that affliction.

Thus sauntering along moodily, my chin on my chest and much too
absorbed in reflection to have any nice appreciation of what was
happening about me, I was crossing in front of a dilapidated block of
houses, dating back nearly to the time of the Pilgrim Fathers, when I
had a vague consciousness of something dark suddenly sweeping by me--a
thing like a huge bat, or a solid shadow, if such a thing could be, and
the next instant there was a thud and a bump, a bump again, a
half-stifled cry, and then a hurried vision of some black carpeting
that flapped and shook as though all the winds of Eblis were in its
folds, and then apparently disgorged from its inmost recesses a little
man.

Before my first start of half-amused surprise was over I saw him by the
flickering lamp-light clutch at space as he tried to steady himself,
stumble on the slippery curb, and the next moment go down on the back
of his head with a most ugly thud.

Now I was not destitute of feeling, though it had been my lot to see
men die in many ways, and I ran over to that motionless form without an
idea that anything but an ordinary accident had occurred. There he
lay, silent and, as it turned out afterwards, dead as a door-nail, the
strangest old fellow ever eyes look