gle was going on, I felt
miserable. I could not sleep. Horrible as the creature was, it was
pitiful to think of the pangs it was suffering.

At last it died. Hammond and I found it cold and stiff one morning in
the bed. The heart had ceased to beat, the lungs to inspire. We hastened
to bury it in the garden. It was a strange funeral, the dropping of that
viewless corpse into the damp hole. The cast of its form I gave to
Doctor X----, who keeps it in his museum in Tenth Street.

As I am on the eve of a long journey from which I may not return, I have
drawn up this narrative of an event the most singular that has ever come
to my knowledge.

The Middle Toe of the Right Foot

BY AMBROSE BIERCE

From _Can Such Things Be?_ by Ambrose Bierce. Copyright by the
Neale Publishing Company. By permission of the publishers.

I

It is well known that the old Manton house is haunted. In all the rural
district near about, and even in the town of Marshall, a mile away, not
one person of unbiased mind entertains a doubt of it; incredulity is
confined to those opinionated persons who will be called "cranks" as
soon as the useful word shall have penetrated the intellectual demesne
of the Marshall _Advance_. The evidence that the house is haunted is of
two kinds; the testimony of disinterested witnesses who have had ocular
proof, and that of the house itself. The former may be disregarded and
ruled out on any of the various grounds of objection which may be urged
against it by the ingenious; but facts within the observation of all are
material and controlling.

In the first place the Manton house has been unoccupied by mortals for
more than ten years, and with its outbuildings is slowly falling into
decay--a circumstance which in itself the judicious will hardly venture
to ignore. It stands a little way off the loneliest reach of the
Marshall and Harriston road, in an opening which was once a farm and is
still disfigured with strips of rotting fence and half covered with
brambles overrunning a stony and sterile soil long unacquainted with the
plow. The house itself is in tolerably good condition, though badly
weather-stained and in dire need of attention from the glazier, the
smaller male population of the region having attested in the manner of
its kind its disapproval of dwelling without dwellers. It is two stories
in height, nearly square, its front pierced by a single doorway flanked
on each side by a window boa