Short Fiction quotes

In looking over the papers of my late valued and respected friend, Francis Purcell, who for nearly fifty years discharged the arduous duties of a parish priest in the south of Ireland, I met with the following document.

It is one of many such; for he was a curious and industrious collector of old local traditions—a commodity in which the quarter where he resided mightily abounded. The collection and arrangement of such legends was, as long as I can remember him, his hobby;

I sacrificed a higher and a nobler duty than I have since been called upon to perform, to the dastardly fear of bearing the unmerited censure of a world from which I was about to retire.

O Fashion! thou gaudy idol, whose feet are red with the blood of human sacrifice, would I had always felt towards thee as I now do!

O’Connor was not dejected; on the contrary, he joined with loud and lively alacrity in the hilarity of the little party;

I cannot think of him now without more solemn feelings than if he were with me.

There is something holy in our thoughts of the dead; I feel it so.

” After a pause, she continued—“Mr. Purcell, do you remember his features well? they were very beautiful.” I assured her that I did. “Then you can tell me if you think this a faithful likeness.”

Dead! thought I, scarcely venturing to look upon the tremendous and revolting spectacle.

Dead! without an hour for repentance, even a moment for reflection; dead! without the rites which even the best should have.

Is there a hope for him? The glaring eyeball, the grinning mouth, the distorted brow—that unutterable look in which a painter would have sought to embody the fixed despair of the nethermost hell. These were my answer.

it certainly was not apoplexy, catalepsy, nor delirium tremens, and yet it seemed, in some degree, to partake of the properties of all.

It was strange, but stranger things are coming.

During two or three days Dr. D⸺ would not allow his patient to converse in a manner which could excite or exhaust him, with anyone; he suffered him merely as briefly as possible to express his immediate wants.

Connell, however, previously to entering the room, had announced his determination to take nothing more than the strictest temperance would warrant.

But oh! who can describe the inveterate tenacity with which a drunkard’s habits cling to him through life?

He may repent—he may reform—he may look with actual abhorrence upon his past profligacy;

With the particulars of Sir Arthur’s and his son’s escape, as far as they are known, you are acquainted. You are also in possession of their after fate—the terrible, the tremendous retribution which, after long delays of many years, finally overtook and crushed them.

Wonderful and inscrutable are the dealings of God with His creatures.

Deep and fervent as must always be my gratitude to heaven for my deliverance, effected by a chain of providential occurrences, the failing of a single link of which must have ensured my destruction, I was long before I could look back upon it with …

There was nothing to shade the clearness of her beautiful complexion; the delicately-formed features, so exquisite when taken singly, so indescribable when combined, so purely artless, yet so meet for all expression.

She was a thing so very beautiful, you could not look on her without feeling your heart touched as by sweet music.

Whose lightest action was a grace—whose lightest word a spell—no limner’s art, though ne’er so perfect, could shadow forth her beauty; and do I dare with feeble words try to make you see it?

The wound had been truly dealt—the tide of life had ebbed; and his father had not arrived five minutes when young O’Mara was a corpse. His body rests in the vaults of Christ Church, in Dublin, without a stone to mark the spot.

The counsels of the wicked are always dark, and their motives often beyond fathoming

;

Heathcote lived to a very advanced age, being of that hard mould which is not easily impressionable.

The selfish and the hardhearted survive where nobler, more generous, and, above all, more sympathising natures would have sunk forever.

Dwyer certainly succeeded in extorting, I cannot say how, considerable and advantageous leases from Colonel O’Mara;

Gerard Douw knew nothing of the attachment which had sprung up between his pupil and his niece; and even if he had, it is doubtful whether he would have regarded its existence as any serious obstruction to the wishes of Mynher Vanderhausen.

Marriages were then and there matters of traffic and calculation; and it would have appeared as absurd in the eyes of the guardian to make a mutual attachment an essential element in a contract of marriage, as it would have been to draw up his bonds and receipts in the language of chivalrous romance.

The painter, however, did not communicate to his niece the important step which he had taken in her behalf, and his resolution arose not from any anticipation of opposition on her part, but solely from a ludicrous consciousness that if his ward were, as she …

They at length prevailed upon her to lie down upon the bed, where she continued to urge them to stay by her. She frequently uttered incoherent sentences, repeating again and again, “The dead and the living cannot be one—God has forbidden it!” and then again,

“Rest to the wakeful⁠—sleep to the sleepwalkers.”

These and such mysterious and broken sentences she continued to utter until the clergyman arrived.

… Ireland, abounding as she does from shore to shore with all that is beautiful, and grand, and savage in scenery, and filled with wild recollections, vivid passions, warm affections, and keen sorrow, could find no language to speak withal, but that of mummery and jest.

No, her language is imperfect, but there is strength in its rudeness, and beauty in its wildness; and, above all, strong feeling flows through it, like fresh fountains in rugged caverns.

And yet I will not say that the language of genuine indigenous Irish composition is always vulgar and uncouth:

I recollect upon one occasion his detecting me in the very act of following his recitation with my pencil and I shall not soon forget his indignant scowl, as stopping abruptly in the midst of a line, he sharply exclaimed:

“Is my pome a pigsty, or what, that you want a surveyor’s ground-plan of it?”

Owing to this absurd scruple, I have been obliged, with one exception, that of the ballad of “Phaudhrig Crohoore,” to rest satisfied with such snatches and fragments of his poetry as my memory could bear away—a fact which must account for the mutilated state in …

“An’ if I done right,” says he, for the spoonful of boilin’ wather riz him entirely,

“I’d take yourself,” says he, “an’ I’d stuff you into the pot an the fire, an’ boil you,” says he, “into castor oil,” says he.

“That’s purty behavour,” says she; “it’s fine usage you’re givin’ me, isn’t it?” says she, gettin’ wickeder every minute; “but before I’m boiled,” says she, “thry how you like that,” says she;

An’ bad luck to the word he’d allow anyone to say an the business, ever after, at all, at all; so, av coorse, no one offinded his raverence, by spakin’ iv the twelve pounds he got for layin’ the sperit.

An’ the neighbours wor all mighty well plased, to be sure, for gettin’ all the divarsion of a wake, an’ two weddin’s for nothin’.

My father had never seemed to love or to take an interest in me.

He had desired a son, and I think he never thoroughly forgave me my unfortunate sex.

My having come into the world at all as his child he regarded as a kind of fraudulent intrusion, and as his antipathy to me had its origin in an imperfection of mine, too radical for removal, I never even hoped to stand high in …

There was here a long pause; and at length, turning sharply towards me, in a tone very unlike that in which he had hitherto addressed me, he said:

“Do you think it possible that a woman can keep a secret?”

“I am sure,” said I, “that women are very much belied upon the score of talkativeness, and that I may answer your question with the same directness with which you put it—I reply that I do think a woman can keep a secret.”

“I am sure,” said I, “that women are very much belied upon the score of talkativeness, and that I may answer your question with the same directness with which you put it—I reply that I do think a woman can keep a secret.”

“But I do not,” said he, drily.

We walked on in silence for a time. I was much astonished at his unwonted abruptness—I had almost said rudeness.

After lying for about an hour awake, I at length fell into a kind of doze; but my imagination was still busy, for I was startled from this unrefreshing sleep by fancying that I heard a voice close to my face exclaim as before:

“There is blood upon your ladyship’s throat.”

The words were instantly followed by a loud burst of laughter.

… a strange phantom-like character, the varying shadows thrown by the flickering of the lamplight, seemed shaping themselves into grotesque and unearthly forms, and whenever my eyes wandered to the sleeping figure of my husband, his features appeared to undergo the strangest and most demoniacal contortions.

Hour after hour was told by the old clock, and each succeeding one found me, if possible, less inclined to sleep than its predecessor.

It was now considerably past three; my eyes, in their involuntary wanderings, happened to alight upon the large mirror which was, as I have said, fixed in the wall opposite the foot of the bed.

she quickly selected one, which she fixed firmly in her grasp. She now stooped down as before, and having listened for a time, she, with the hand that was disengaged, groped her way into the dressing-room where Lord Glenfallen lay fast asleep.

I was fixed as if in the tremendous spell of a nightmare.

I could not stir even a finger; I could not lift my voice; I could not even breathe;

Before, however, the mandate was executed, she threw her arms wildly into the air, and uttered one piercing shriek so full of preternatural rage and despair, that it might fitly have ushered a soul into those realms where hope can come no more.

The sound still rang in my ears, months after the voice that had uttered it was forever silent.

The wretched woman was executed in accordance with the sentence which had been pronounced.

I turned with a sigh from my last hope, and began to pace my narrow prison floor, when my eye suddenly encountered an old rusty nail or holdfast sticking in the wall.

All the gold of Plutus would not have been so welcome as that rusty piece of iron.

I instantly wrung it from the wall, and inserting the point between the planks of the door into the bolt, and working it backwards and forwards, I had at length the unspeakable satisfaction to perceive that the beam was actually yielding to my efforts, and …

Had that little sound but reached the ear of any of the wretches who occupied the chamber, I must have perished.

On such threads hang the lives of men!

Weak and exhausted by the fruitless effort which I had made, I resigned myself in mute horror to witness the tragedy which I had no power to prevent.

As time wore on, I began to grow weary of uncontrolled indulgence.

Fashion is a hard taskmaster⁠—vice and pleasure tire their pursuers at length more than the severest toil⁠—monotony dulls the edge of enjoyment, and the solicitous repinings of conscience wear the spirits, and irritate and embitter the temper

; all this I felt, and half (but only half) resolved to reform, and lead a better life. In this melancholy mood I was wandering through the oldest and least-frequented streets of the city, when a singular adventure befell me.

and in this mad enterprise the unhappy woman had at last effectually compromised herself, and was forced to the terrible necessity of flight.

Her fall was not that of an impure, but of a vengeful spirit.

It was the act of a bitter and passionate suicide, who would squander fifty lives to bring home one pang of remorse, or any other feeling, to the heart of callous indifference. Poor thing! the world understood her character, and despised her;

My ill-bred stare was unobserved, and I could, on reflection, scarcely help laughing at the absurdity of the emotion which had inspired it. But, after all, why should I?—the nature of the beast pervades us all.

The presence of beauty is a woeful stimulus to unprovoked combativeness

, and I do believe there is a lurking idea universally in the mind of man, that beauty should be, somehow, the prize of the fiercest and strongest—the

I know it was ever the case with me—

I never saw, at least in my young days, a pretty girl, without feeling a disposition to fight with somebody

—and this, although, under ordinary circumstances, as peaceable a fellow as any among her majesty’s liege subjects.

… which would have precluded the moral possibility of Jennings’ hazarding the audacious step which ended so fatally for himself, and the unexpected and impending return of Chadleigh was the first event which recalled the reckless and unprincipled man to a sense of his actual position.

How often is crime unavailing for its meditated purpose, and effective only for the ruin of him who plans it.

While Jennings was stoutly denying his marriage with Mary Chadleigh, to avoid the fancied danger of a prosecution, the poor young lady’s brother was bringing with him tidings of the death (long previous to his marriage with Miss Chadleigh) of the profligate woman, whose claim …

I call it lucky merely; but, perhaps, you are happier in your faith, than I in my philosophy. Yes, you are grateful for the chance that I only rejoice at. You receive it as a proof of a divine and tender love—I as an accident.

Delusions are often more elevating than truth.

”

I am my own servant, and, I hope, my own master, too. I rely upon myself in matters of the body and of the mind. I place valets and priests in the same category—fellows who live by our laziness, intellectual or corporeal.

I am a Voltaire, without his luxuries⁠—a Robinson Crusoe, without his Bible⁠—an anchorite, without a superstition⁠—in short, my indulgence is asceticism, and my faith infidelity.

Therefore, I shan’t disturb your servants much with my bell, nor yourselves with my psalmody. You have got a rational lodger, who knows how to attend upon himself.”

As it happened, her presentiment was but too truly prophetic. The apothecary said the child’s ailment was “suppressed smallpox”; the physician pronounced it “typhus.” The only certainty about it was the issue—the child died.

To me few things appear so beautiful as a very young child in its shroud.

The little innocent face looks so sublimely simple and confiding amongst the cold terrors of death—crimeless, and fearless, that little mortal has passed alone under the shadow, and explored the mystery of dissolution.

I now see that the calamity which bore at first such evil fruit, was good for me. It fixed my mind, however rebelliously, upon God, and it stirred up all the passions of my heart.

Levity, inattention, and self-complacency are obstacles harder to be overcome than the violence of evil passions⁠—the transition from hate is easier than from indifference, to love.

A mighty change was making on my mind.

“

The more trouble befalls you, the nearer is God to you.

He visits you in sorrow—and sorrow, as well as joy, is a sign of his presence. If, then, other griefs overtake you, remember this—be patient, be faithful; and bless the name of God.”

The absolute changelessness of her condition filled us with despair. The day which had elapsed had not witnessed even a transitory variation in the dreadful character of her seizure.

Any change, even a change for the worse, would have been better than this sluggish, hopeless monotony of suffering.

At the appointed hour the physician returned. He appeared disappointed, almost shocked, at the failure of his prescriptions. On feeling her pulse he declared that she must have a little wine.

Thin neighbourhoods are favourable to scandal; and in such localities the reputation of a house, like that of a woman, once blown upon, never quite recovers.

In huge London, however, it is quite another matter;

and, therefore, it was with some surprise that, five years after I had vacated the house in which the occurrences I have described took place, I learned that a respectable family who had taken it were obliged to give it up, on account of annoyances, …

There’s nothin’ like it. The toothache an’ cholic together id compose you betther for an argyment than itself. It leaves you fit for nothin’ bud nansinse.

It’s stronger than whisky, for one good drop iv it will make you drunk for one year, and sick, begorra, for a dozen.

It’s stronger than the say, for it’ll carry you round the world an’ never let you sink, in sunshine or storm; an’, begorra, it’s stronger than Death himself, for it is not afeard iv him, bedad, but dares him in every shape.

It’s stronger than whisky, for one good drop iv it will make you drunk for one year, and sick, begorra, for a dozen.

It’s stronger than the say, for it’ll carry you round the world an’ never let you sink, in sunshine or storm; an’, begorra, it’s stronger than Death himself, for it is not afeard iv him, bedad, but dares him in every shape.

But lovers has quarrels sometimes, and, begorra, when they do, you’d a’most imagine they hated one another like man and wife. An’ so, signs an’, Billy Malowney and Molly Donovan fell out one evening at ould Tom Dundon’s wake;

Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, unillustrated by its legends of terror.

You might as well expect to find a decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an authentic population of goblins.

Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, unillustrated by its legends of terror.

You might as well expect to find a decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an authentic population of goblins.

Now, although this class of inhabitants are in nowise amenable to the police authorities, yet, as their demeanor directly affects the comforts of her Majesty’s subjects, I cannot but regard it as a grave omission that the public have hitherto been left without any statistical …

“I humbly thank your honour,” said Peter, drawing nearer—for the affability and the nativity of the officer encouraged him—“but maybe your honour is in the sarvice of the King of France?”

“I serve the same King as you do,” he answered, with a sorrowful significance which Peter did not comprehend at the time

; and, interrogating in turn, he asked, “But what calls you forth at this hour of the day?”

Ghosts in Chapelizod, my good sir! “Why who knows not so?” A place that is itself a shadow of things past, the living spectre of old times.

Chapelizod is all a ghost.

If anyone desires to see a suburban village of the once proud city of Dublin reduced to a marrowless skeleton, without a single speculation in its eye by which it can ever hope to rise again, let him go to Chapelizod. Dead walls;

The General of Division, dining at the mess on the occasion of a quarterly inspection, complimented Clifford upon the excellent state of drill in which he found the regiment, and, alluding to his name, asked “if he had any relations on the staff?”

“No, General,” he replied, “but I have a great number on the spade.”

It happened, on some occasion, that he displeased his colonel, who, in a hasty moment, declared his regret at having raised him from the state in which he had found him.

It happened, on some occasion, that he displeased his colonel, who, in a hasty moment, declared his regret at having raised him from the state in which he had found him.

“Then, Colonel Latouche,” said Clifford, “you are the first of your name that ever was sorry for doing a good action.”

It is scarcely necessary to say that so adroit and just a compliment replaced him at once in his good patron’s favour.

But it is a venture to do as you would have me.

Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the marvellous, and a “reader” decidedly a more critical animal than a “listener.”

If, however, you can induce your friends to read it after nightfall, and when the fireside talk has run for a while on thrilling tales of shapeless terror;

I sat down and stared at the square label on the solemn and reserved-looking black bottle, until “Flanagan & Co.’s Best Old Malt Whisky” grew into a sort of subdued accompaniment to all the fantastic and horrible speculations which chased one another through my brain.

Silence, meanwhile, grew more silent, and darkness darker.

I listened in vain for the rumble of a vehicle, or the dull clamour of a distant row. There was nothing but the sound of a rising wind, which had succeeded the thunderstorm that had travelled over the Dublin mountains quite out of hearing.

In the middle of this great city I began to feel myself alone with nature, and Heaven knows what beside. My courage was ebbing.

Punch, however, which makes beasts of so many, made a man of me again

—just in time to hear with tolerable nerve and firmness the lumpy, flabby, naked feet deliberately descending the stairs again.

“

One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive.

In all this, I need hardly tell you, Dick, I was simply lying to myself, and did not believe one word of the wretched humbug.

“

Knowledge is sorrow,

” answered Una, and she looked across the room through her golden hair which she was combing—and through the window, beyond which lay the tops of the great trees, and the still foliage of the glen in the misty moonlight.

With a strange wild feeling of suspicion and terror, Alice glided to the window.

The moon who sees so many things, and keeps all secrets, with her cold impenetrable smile, was high in the sky.

But Alice saw the red flicker of a candle from Una’s window, and, she thought, the shadow of her head against the deep side wall of its recess. Then this was gone, and there were no more sights or sounds that night.

“Besides, you will never discover the grand arcanum—the elixir vitae, or the philosopher’s stone.”

His words, which were as soft as snowflakes, fell like an iron mace upon the heart of the seer.

“Perhaps not,” said the astrologer frigidly.

I suppose he doesn’t care if Browning was hanged; but simply Browning is a man, and I a woman. That’s it, Winnie—that’s all—I’m to be robbed, and no one to prevent it. A conspiracy I call it. I tell you, Winnie,

I never knew one man prevent another’s robbing a woman, except when he hoped to rob her himself.

”

there’s a raw there as big as my hand—you don’t want her to founder ’twixt this and Muckleston, I’m sure; and you wouldn’t be so hard on the brute, to drive her without one—and that’s why, ma’am.”

Tom’s way with women when he was late, was to complicate the case, with an issue on farriery, which soon shuts them up.

So Winnifred got in with a basket of edibles, and the carpetbag on the seat beside my Aunt, who entered the vehicle severely.

I believe few wives have ever cried more in a given time than did that poor, dumpy, potato-faced heiress, who got over the nunnery garden wall, and jumped into the handsome Captain’s arms, for love.

He spent her income, frightened her out of her wits with oaths and threats, and broke her heart.

Latterly she shut herself up pretty nearly altogether in her room. She had an old, rather grim, Irish servant-woman in attendance upon her. This domestic was tall, lean, and religious, and the Captain knew instinctively she hated him;

Never was man more relieved than the Squire, and he slept better for a week after this than he had done for many weeks before.

It behoves us all to act promptly on our good resolutions.

There is a determined gravitation towards evil, which, if left to itself, will bear down first intentions.

This was very odd, old Cooper thought, and a great liberty; so upstairs he went to make them out.

But he could not find them then, nor ever. And from that hour the house was troubled.

In a little time there was not one of the servants who had not something to tell. Steps and voices followed them sometimes in the passages, and tittering whispers, always minatory, scared them at corners of the galleries, or from dark recesses;

She told me that she had heard from Mr. Jennings’ niece, Martha, in Shropshire. There was nothing to be gathered from her letter, more than that he was low and nervous.

In those words, of which healthy people think so lightly, what a world of suffering is sometimes hidden!

Nearly five weeks passed without any further news of Mr. Jennings. At the end of that time I received a note from him. He wrote:

“Yes; but not good for the mind—the Christian mind, I mean.

Paganism is all bound together in essential unity, and, with evil sympathy, their religion involves their art, and both their manners, and the subject is a degrading fascination and the nemesis sure.

God forgive me!

It looked dazed and languid. An irrepressible uneasiness as to its movements kept my eyes always upon it. Its eyes were half closed, but I could see them glow. It was looking steadily at me.

In all situations, at all hours, it is awake and looking at me. That never changes.

“I shall not continue in detail my narrative of this particular night. I shall describe, rather, the phenomena of the first year, which never varied, essentially. I shall describe the monkey as it appeared in daylight.

“

In total dark it is visible as in daylight.

I do not mean merely its eyes. It is all visible distinctly in a halo that resembles a glow of red embers, and which accompanies it in all its movements.

Yet I know it is true. It is the story of the process of a poison, a poison which excites the reciprocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior.

Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.

My dear Van L., you have suffered from an affection similar to that which I have just described. You twice complained of a return of it.

… pasturage, on which browsed a few scattered sheep or kine, skirts this solitary road for some miles, and under shelter of a hillock, and of two or three great ash-trees, stood, not many years ago, the little thatched cabin of a widow named Mary Ryan.

Poor was this widow in a land of poverty.

The thatch had acquired the grey tint and sunken outlines, that show how the alternations of rain and sun have told upon that perishable shelter.

It is well known that the great Earl of Desmond, though history pretends to dispose of him differently, lives to this hour enchanted in his castle, with all his household, at the bottom of the lake.

There was not, in his day, in all the world, so accomplished a magician as he.

His fairest castle stood upon an island in the lake, and to this he brought his young and beautiful bride, whom he loved but too well; for she prevailed upon his folly to risk all to gratify her imperious caprice.

“

I’ve been looking for you, Tom. Welcome home, lad; come along to your place.

”

he went to church; in fine weather they crossed the moor to Shackleton Church; the vicar said he came there to look at the scenery of his vision, and to fortify his good resolutions by the reminder.

Impressions upon the imagination, however, are but transitory, and a bad man acting under fear is not a free agent; his real character does not appear.

But as the images of the imagination fade, and the action of fear abates, the essential qualities of the man reassert themselves.

and he told me that there was a currant-cake, and tea, and pork-chops, waiting for me, all hot, in my aunt’s room at the great house. It was a fine moonlight night, and I eat the apples, lookin’ out o’ the shay winda.

It’s a shame for gentlemen to frighten a poor foolish child like I was.

I sometimes think it might be tricks. There was two on ’em on the tap o’ the coach beside me. And they began to question me after nightfall, when the moon rose, where I was going to.

She sank back on the pillow with a sigh, and her fine eyes followed me with a fond and melancholy gaze, and she murmured again, “Good night, dear friend.”

Young people like, and even love, on impulse.

I was flattered by the evident, though as yet undeserved, fondness she showed me. I liked the confidence with which she at once received me. She was determined that we should be very near friends.

I dare say I was unreasonable, perhaps I was wrong; I dare say I ought to have respected the solemn injunction laid upon my father by the stately lady in black velvet.

But curiosity is a restless and unscrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.

What harm could it do anyone to tell me what I so ardently desired to know? Had she no trust in my good sense or honour?

In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but

I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence.

This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling.

though with a vivid and very sharp remembrance of the main current of my story. But,

I suspect, in all lives there are certain emotional scenes, those in which our passions have been most wildly and terribly roused, that are of all others the most vaguely and dimly remembered.

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again;

“Yes, very—a cruel love—strange love, that would have taken my life.

Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood.

Let us go to sleep now; I feel so lazy. How can I get up just now and lock my door?”

Religion was a subject on which I had never heard her speak a word. If I had known the world better, this particular neglect or antipathy would not have so much surprised me.

The precautions of nervous people are infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty sure, after a time, to imitate them.

I had adopted Carmilla’s habit of locking her bedroom door, having taken into my head all her whimsical alarms about midnight invaders and prowling assassins.

Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace.

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony.

Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony.

I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was.

It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders.

A block of stone could not have been more still.

There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.

There were whispered stories in Golden Friars about Toby Crooke. Nobody could say how they got there.

Nothing is more mysterious than the spread of rumour. It is like a vial poured on the air.

It travels, like an epidemic, on the sightless currents of the atmosphere, or by the laws of a telluric influence equally intangible. These stories treated, though darkly, of the long period of his absence from his native village;

A woman, coarse, uneducated, vain, and violent, does not reason, or even feel, very distinctly; but in these tears of consternation were mingling a self-upbraiding. She felt afraid of that little child.

But Mrs. Carwell was a person who lived not upon sentiment, but upon beef and pudding; she consoled herself with punch

; she did not trouble herself long even with resentments; she was a gross and material person, and could not mourn over the irrevocable for more than a limited number of hours, even if she would.

Captain Barton arrested his course as formerly—the unaccountable nature of the occurrence filled him with vague and disagreeable sensations—and yielding to the excitement that was gaining upon him, he shouted sternly, “Who goes there?”

The sound of one’s own voice, thus exerted, in utter solitude, and followed by total silence, has in it something unpleasantly dismaying

, and he felt a degree of nervousness which, perhaps, from no cause had he ever known before.

It was not until he had reached his lodging, and sat by his own fireside, that he felt sufficiently reassured to rearrange and reconsider in his own mind the occurrences which had so discomposed him.

So little a matter, after all, is sufficient to upset the pride of scepticism and vindicate the old simple laws of nature within us.

Mr.

In this mood I heard, with an unpleasant surprise, close to me, a voice that was drawling, and, I fancied, sneering, repeat the words:

“Food for worms, dead and rotten; God over all.”

There was a small window in the wall, here very thick, which had been built up, and in the dark recess of this, deep in the shadow, I now saw a sharp-featured man, sitting with his feet dangling.

“I never sid ye neyawheere,” she exclaimed sternly.

“Fine evening, Mother Carke,” he says, and holds his snuffbox toward her.

She widened the distance between them by a step or so, and said again sternly and pale,

“That’s a byneyam; the lass’s neyam is Laura Lew,” she answered, looking straight before her.

“One name’s as good as another for one that was never christened, mother.”

“How know ye that?” she asked grimly; for it is a received opinion in that part of the world that the fairies have power over those who have never been baptised.