I couldn't join, my host
added, '_if he be walled up_, I am sure you will say, Newburgh, that he's
a persevering old gentleman, and makes the most laudable efforts to get
out of his cell.'"

"The levity of some persons," was the major's grave aside, "how
inconceivable, how indescribable!"

"My visit," continued he, "lasted about a fortnight, during the whole of
which period, at intervals, the rapping was audible in different parts of
the house. It appeared to me however--I watched attentively--to come with
the greatest frequency from the hall. Thence it sounded as if an immense
mallet, muffled in feathers or cotton, was striking heavily on the floor.
The noise was generally heard between twelve and two. The blows sometimes
followed each other with great rapidity; at other times more slowly and
leisurely. One singularity of the visitation was this--that in whatever
part of the house you might be listening, the noise seemed to come from a
remote direction. If you heard the blows in the drawing-room, they
appeared to be given in the library. And if you heard them in the
library, they seemed to be falling in the nursery. The invisible workman
was busy always _at a distance_. Another feature was its locomotive
powers. It moved with the most extraordinary rapidity. Nothing that I
could think of--mice, rats, drains, currents of air, dropping of
water--would explain it. If the noise had been caused by the agency of
any one of these causes, it would have been heard in the day time. _It
never was_. Night was the season, and the only season in which the
ponderous, but invisible, mallet was wielded. Nothing could exceed the
kindness with which I was treated. No words can do justice to the
thoughtful and delicate hospitality which I received. But I declare to
you this mysterious visitation was too much for me. It was impossible to
listen to it at night without depression. Perhaps my nerves were
unstrung. The tone of my system might be enfeebled. The fault, I dare
say, was in myself. But to lie awake, as I often did, during long hours
from pain, and to hear this muffled, hollow, droning, mysterious noise
passing from room to room about the house--to listen to it now above me,
now below me, now quite close to my chamber door, and in a couple of
seconds rising up from the very center of the hall, and to be all the
while utterly unable to account for it, fevered me. I curtailed my visit;
but the nursing and kindness I received are gra