ed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drowsiness, and
felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry something swept past his
cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress. He
could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by the
vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were blotted
out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had suddenly come.
Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of the things about
him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep overcame him,
brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many thoughts that
lacerated his heart.

Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was like
some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls headlong over
into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes, dazzled by bright
rays from a red circle of light that shone out from the shadows. In the
midst of the circle stood a little old man who turned the light of the
lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter, nor move, nor speak.
There was something magical about the apparition. The boldest man,
awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at the sight of this
figure, which might have issued from some sarcophagus hard by.

A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief space
between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment remained
philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in spite
of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable hallucination, a
mystery that our pride rejects, and that our imperfect science vainly
tries to resolve.

Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown
girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long white hair escaped on
either side of his face from under a black velvet cap which closely
fitted his head and made a formal setting for his countenance. His
gown enveloped his body like a winding sheet, so that all that was left
visible was a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm, thin
as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its light
upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid air. A gray pointed
beard concealed the chin of this fantastical appearance, and gave him
the look of one of those Jewish types which ser