ghbor to a place from which there come such
strange noises. Sometimes it is the dragging of something heavy over the
floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,--it sounds so like what people
that kill other people have to do now and then. Occasionally I hear very
sweet strains of music,--whether of a wind or stringed instrument, or a
human voice, strange as it may seem, I have often tried to find out, but
through the partition I could not be quite sure. If I have not heard
a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die
laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess
it--I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy
in my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that
so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
neck-lace, but a dull-stain.

Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions about
the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take all that
nonsense out of any man's head! It is not our beliefs that frighten us
half so much as our fancies. A man not only believes, but knows he runs
a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but it does n't worry him
much. On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way
from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there
were strange deaths a good many years ago, and there are rumors of ugly
spots on the walls,--the old man hung himself in the garret, that is
certain, and ever since the country-people have called it "the haunted
house,"--the owners have n't been able to let it since the last tenants
left on account of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the
moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have
turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear,
and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,
--take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
alone,--how do you think he will like it? He doesn't believe one word
of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his
imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghostly images. It is
not what we believe, as I said before, that frighten