last, we find him pallid, haggard, and emaciated,
wandering alone in an avenue of cedar trees beside a silent lake:

"At this moment a breath of wind blew a branch aside--a
sunbeam fell upon the baron's face; he took it for the
eyes of his wife. Alas! his remedy lay temptingly
before him, the still, the profound, the shadowy lake.
De Launaye took one plunge--it was into eternity."

The writer foolishly ruins the effect of this climax by
super-imposing an allegorical interpretation.

Like the _Story-Teller, The Romancist and Novelist's Library_
should be read

"At night when doors are shut,
And the wood-worm pricks,
And the death-watch ticks,
And the bar has a flag of smut,--
And the cat's in the water-butt--
And the socket floats and flares,
And the housebeams groan,
And a foot unknown
Is surmised on the garret stairs,
And the locks slip unawares."

But "tales of terror" lose some of their power when read one
after another; they are most effective read singly in
periodicals. _Blackwood's Magazine_ was especially famous for its
tales, the best of which have been collected and published
separately. The editor of the _Dublin University Magazine_ shows
a marked preference for tales of a supernatural or sensational
cast. Le Fanu, who claimed that his stories, like those of Sir
Walter Scott, belonged to the "legitimate school of English
tragic romance," was one of the best-known contributors. _All the
Year Round_ and _Household Words_, under the editorship of
Dickens, often found room for the occult and the uncanny. Wilkie
Collins' fascinating serial, _The Moonstone_, was published in
_All the Year Round_ in 1868; _The Woman in White_ had appeared
six years earlier in _Blackwood_. The stories included in these
magazines are of various types. The old-fashioned spook gradually
declines in popularity. He is ousted in a scientific age by more
recondite forms of terror. Before 1875, with a few belated
exceptions:

"Ghosts, wandering here and there
Troop home to churchyards, damned spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone."

The "explained supernatural" is skilfully improved and developed.
Le Fanu's _Green Tea_ is a story from the diary of a German
doctor, concerning a patient who was dogged by a black monkey.
The creature, "whose green eyes glow with an expression of
unfathomable malignity," is medically explain