in what is called a three-quarter position. The light
which illuminated it did not come from the window, which was directly
behind me and gave all the light there was in the room, and yet the
impression was in no respect that of a picture. Not for a moment did
this interpretation occur to me, strongly as did the evanescent
character of the head militate against the idea of reality. The fading
was most rapid at the occiput, and may be said to have begun there,
extending to the right and upward. There was no background or accessory
of any kind, the head being quite isolated and detached, objectively as
subjectively.

The lineaments were not those of any one of my acquaintance, and
recalled no countenance I had ever seen. If the appearance suggested a
young member of the family, it was not because of resemblance, but from
his being frequently in my mind, and apt to be associated with any alarm
due to the tinge of superstition from which none of us are wholly free.
For the reason already given it could not have been a reminiscence of a
picture. The shading and coloring were too exact for anything painted.
My easel was, it is true, near by, on the opposite side of me, and on it
were two heads of nearly the size of that I describe; but they were
hard-featured old saints of a deep mahogany hue, relieved by a very dark
background, and therefore the exact antipodes of my shadowy visitant. On
these I had been painting an hour or two before; and that is the
solitary connection conceivable between the spectre and anything
tangible. The reader will perhaps be inclined to set it down as having
been complementary to them. I do not think it was; but were it so, the
point mainly craving explanation remains untouched--that what I saw was
with the waking eye. It may have come from the land of dreams, or from a
remote outlying province of it, but its perceptible existence was
entirely in the realm of actualities. I was not conscious, and had no
recollection, of having had a dream. It is true that, according to a
theory necessarily and in its nature incapable of being sustained by
positive proof, we may have unconscious dreams, and be always dreaming
when asleep without knowing it. Persons who rise at night, take pen and
paper and solve problems which had been the worry of their waking hours,
and return to their couch still asleep, present cases analogous to mine
in so far as their unconscious mental activity leaves an outcome and
expressio