nd for the same reason make no record of the next four or five
interviews I had with Mr. Jaffrey. It will be sufficient to state that
Andy glided from extreme infancy to early youth with astonishing
celerity--at the rate of one year per night, if I remember correctly;
and--must I confess it?--before the week came to an end, this invisible
hobgoblin of a boy was only little less of a reality to me than to
Mr. Jaffrey.

At first I had lent myself to the old dreamer's whim with a keen
perception of the humor of the thing; but by and by I found that I was
talking and thinking of Miss Mehetabel's son as though he were a
veritable personage. Mr. Jaffrey spoke of the child with such an air of
conviction!--as if Andy were playing among his toys in the next room, or
making mud-pies down in the yard. In these conversations, it should be
observed, the child was never supposed to be present, except on that
single occasion when Mr. Jaffrey leaned over the cradle. After one of
our _seances_ I would lie awake until the small hours, thinking of the
boy, and then fall asleep only to have indigestible dreams about him.
Through the day, and sometimes in the midst of complicated calculations,
I would catch myself wondering what Andy was up to now! There was no
shaking him off; he became an inseparable nightmare to me; and I felt
that if I remained much longer at Bayley's Four-Corners I should turn
into just such another bald-headed, mild-eyed visionary as
Silas Jaffrey.

Then the tavern was a grewsome old shell any way, full of unaccountable
noises after dark--rustlings of garments along unfrequented passages,
and stealthy footfalls in unoccupied chambers overhead. I never knew of
an old house without these mysterious noises. Next to my bedroom was a
musty, dismantled apartment, in one corner of which, leaning against the
wainscot, was a crippled mangle, with its iron crank tilted in the air
like the elbow of the late Mr. Clem Jaffrey. Sometimes,

"In the dead vast and middle of the night,"

I used to hear sounds as if some one were turning that rusty crank on
the sly. This occurred only on particularly cold nights, and I
conceived the uncomfortable idea that it was the thin family ghosts,
from the neglected graveyard in the cornfield, keeping themselves warm
by running each other through the mangle. There was a haunted air about
the whole place that made it easy for me to believe in the existence of
a phantasm like Miss Mehetabel