but lust always prevailed, and Clarke ended by drawing up
his chair, lighting a candle, and sitting down before the bureau. Its
pigeon-holes and drawers teemed with documents on the most morbid
subjects, and in the well reposed a large manuscript volume, in which
he had painfully entered he gems of his collection. Clarke had a fine
contempt for published literature; the most ghostly story ceased to
interest him if it happened to be printed; his sole pleasure was in the
reading, compiling, and rearranging what he called his "Memoirs to
prove the Existence of the Devil," and engaged in this pursuit the
evening seemed to fly and the night appeared too short.

On one particular evening, an ugly December night, black with fog, and
raw with frost, Clarke hurried over his dinner, and scarcely deigned to
observe his customary ritual of taking up the paper and laying it down
again. He paced two or three times up and down the room, and opened
the bureau, stood still a moment, and sat down. He leant back,
absorbed in one of those dreams to which he was subject, and at length
drew out his book, and opened it at the last entry. There were three
or four pages densely covered with Clarke's round, set penmanship, and
at the beginning he had written in a somewhat larger hand:

Singular Narrative told me by my Friend, Dr. Phillips.
He assures me that all the facts related
therein are strictly and wholly True, but
refuses to give either the Surnames of the
Persons Concerned, or the Place where these
Extraordinary Events occurred.

Mr. Clarke began to read over the account for the tenth time, glancing
now and then at the pencil notes he had made when it was told him by
his friend. It was one of his humours to pride himself on a certain
literary ability; he thought well of his style, and took pains in
arranging the circumstances in dramatic order. He read the following
story:--

The persons concerned in this statement are Helen V., who, if she is
still alive, must now be a woman of twenty-three, Rachel M., since
deceased, who was a year younger than the above, and Trevor W., an
imbecile, aged eighteen. These persons were at the period of the story
inhabitants of a village on the borders of Wales, a place of some
importance in the time of the Roman occupation, but now a scattered
hamlet, of not more than five hundred souls. It is situated o