alism that
reminds us of _The Pit and the Pendulum_. To the same class
belongs the skilfully constructed _Iron Shroud_ (1830), by
William Mudford, an author who, as Scott remarks in his journal,
"loves to play at cherry-pit with Satan." The suspense is
ingeniously maintained as, one by one, the windows of the iron
dungeon disappear, until, at last, the massive walls and
ponderous roof contract into the victim's iron shroud. Wilkie
Collins' story, _A Terribly Strange Bed_, which describes the
stratagem of a gang of cardsharpers for getting rid of those who
happen to win money from them, is in the same vein. The canopy
slowly descends during the night, and smothers its victim. A
similar motive is used, with immeasurably finer effect, by Joseph
Conrad in his story of the disappearance of the sailor at the
lonely inn in the mountains of Spain. The experience of Byrne in
_The Inn of the Two Witches_[129] is a masterpiece in the
psychology of terror. The dense darkness, in which the young
naval officer "steers his course only by the feel of the wind,"
the scene when the door of the inn bursts open and reveals in the
candlelight the savage beauty of the gipsy girl with evil,
slanting eyes, and the inhuman ugliness of the old hags, are a
fitting prelude to the horrors of the chamber, where the corpse
of the missing sailor is found in the wardrobe. We pass with
Byrne through the different stages of suspicion and dread until,
completely baffled in his attempt to account for the manner in
which Tom Corbin was done to death, we feel "the hot terror that
plays upon the heart like a tongue of flame that touches and
withdraws before it turns a thing to ashes."

In the short stories of the latter half of the nineteenth
century, it is hard to escape from the terrible. We light upon it
suddenly, here, there and everywhere. We find it in Stevenson's
_New Arabian Nights_, in his _Merry Men_, and his stories of the
South Seas, as indeed we should expect, when we recall the
tapping of the blind man's stick in _Treasure Island_, the scene
with the candles in the snow after the duel between the two
brothers in _The Master of Ballantrae_, or David Balfour's
perilous adventure on the broken staircase in _Kidnapped_.
Kipling is another expert in the art of eeriness, and has a wide
range. His Indian backgrounds are peculiarly adapted for tales of
terror. The loathsome horror of _The Mark of the Beast_, with its
intangible suggestion of mystery