I found myself practically alone, so far as human
intercourse was concerned, in the populous, weary city. A couple of
hours of writing had produced nothing that would bear the test of
sunlight, so I anticipated judgment by tearing up the spoiled sheets of
paper, and threw myself upon the couch before the empty fireplace. It
was a dense, sultry night, with electricity thickening the air, and a
trouble of distant thunder rolling far away on the rim of the cloudy
sky--one of those nights of restless dulness, when you wait and long for
something to happen, and yet feel despondently that nothing ever will
happen again. I passed through a region of aimless thoughts into one
of migratory and unfinished dreams, and dropped from that into an empty
gulf of sleep.

How late it was when I drifted back toward the shore of consciousness,
I cannot tell. But the student-lamp on the table had burned out, and
the light of the gibbous moon was creeping in through the open windows.
Slowly the pale illumination crept up the eastern wall, like a tide
rising as the moon declined. Now it reached the mantel-shelf and
overflowed the bronze heads of Homer and the Indian Bacchus and the
Egyptian image of Isis with the infant Horus. Now it touched the frame
of the picture and lapped over the edge. Now it rose to the shadowy
house and the dim garden, in the midst of which I saw the white blot
more distinctly than ever before.

It seemed now to have taken a new shape, like the slender form of a
woman, robed in flowing white. And as I watched it through half-closed
eyes, the figure appeared to move and tremble and wave to and fro, as if
it were a ghost.

A haunted picture! Why should it not be so? A haunted ruin, a haunted
forest, a haunted ship,--all these have been seen, or imagined, and
reported, and there are learned societies for investigating such things.
Why should not a picture have a ghost in it?

My mind, in that curiously vivid state which lies between waking and
sleeping, went through the form of careful reasoning over the question.
If there may be some subtle connection between a house and the spirits
of the people who have once lived in it,--and wise men have believed
this,--why should there be any impassable gulf between a picture and
the vanished lives out of which it has grown? All the human thought
and feeling which have passed into it through the patient toil of art,
remain forever embodied there. A picture is the most living a