ragged garden which surrounded the house, although displaying on washing
days rather too much clothesline, still gave us a piece of greensward to
look at, and a cool retreat in the summer evenings, where we smoked our
cigars in the dusk, and watched the fireflies flashing their dark
lanterns in the long grass.

Of course we had no sooner established ourselves at No. ---- than we
began to expect ghosts. We absolutely awaited their advent with
eagerness. Our dinner conversation was supernatural. One of the
boarders, who had purchased Mrs. Crowe's _Night Side of Nature_ for his
own private delectation, was regarded as a public enemy by the entire
household for not having bought twenty copies. The man led a life of
supreme wretchedness while he was reading this volume. A system of
espionage was established, of which he was the victim. If he
incautiously laid the book down for an instant and left the room, it was
immediately seized and read aloud in secret places to a select few. I
found myself a person of immense importance, it having leaked out that I
was tolerably well versed in the history of supernaturalism, and had
once written a story the foundation of which was a ghost. If a table or
a wainscot panel happened to warp when we were assembled in the large
drawing-room, there was an instant silence, and everyone was prepared
for an immediate clanking of chains and a spectral form.

After a month of psychological excitement, it was with the utmost
dissatisfaction that we were forced to acknowledge that nothing in the
remotest degree approaching the supernatural had manifested itself. Once
the black butler asseverated that his candle had been blown out by some
invisible agency while he was undressing himself for the night; but as I
had more than once discovered this colored gentleman in a condition when
one candle must have appeared to him like two, thought it possible that,
by going a step further in his potations, he might have reversed this
phenomenon, and seen no candle at all where he ought to have beheld one.

Things were in this state when an accident took place so awful and
inexplicable in its character that my reason fairly reels at the bare
memory of the occurrence. It was the tenth of July. After dinner was
over I repaired, with my friend Dr. Hammond, to the garden to smoke my
evening pipe. Independent of certain mental sympathies which existed
between the Doctor and myself, we were linked together by a vice.