ck at the door or thump at the
partition-wall he was as familiar as with his own wife's voice, and the
touch of whose cold convulsive hand he had felt so often on his cheek or
throat, and the very suspicion of whose approach made him faint with
horror, his dreams would not present to his sight. There was always
something interposed, or he stole behind him, or just as he was entering
and the door swinging open, Sturk would awake--and he never saw him, at
least in a human shape.

But one night he thought he saw, as it were, his sign or symbol. As
Sturk lay his length under the bed-clothes, with his back turned upon
his slumbering helpmate, he was, in the spirit, sitting perpendicularly
in his great balloon-backed chair at his writing-table, in the window of
the back one-pair-of-stairs chamber which he called his library, where
he sometimes wrote prescriptions, and pondering over his pennyweights,
his Roman numerals, his guttae and pillulae, his 3s, his 5s, his 9s, and
the other arabesque and astrological symbols of his mystery, he looked
over his pen into the church-yard, which inspiring prospect he thence
commanded.

Thus, as out of the body sat our recumbent doctor in the room underneath
the bed in which his snoring idolon lay, Tom Dunstan stood beside the
table, with the short white threads sticking out on his blue sleeve,
where the stitching of the stripes had been cut through on that twilight
parade morning when the doctor triumphed, and Tom's rank, fortune, and
castles in the air, all tumbled together in the dust of the barrack
pavement; and so, with his thin features and evil eye turned sideways to
Sturk, says he, with a stiff salute--'A gentleman, Sir, that means to
dine with you,' and there was the muffled knock at the door which he
knew so well, and a rustling behind him. So the doctor turned him about
quickly with a sort of chill between his shoulders, and perched on the
back of his chair sat a portentous old quizzical carrion-crow, the
antediluvian progenitor of the whole race of carrion-crows, monstrous,
with great shining eyes, and head white as snow, and a queer human look,
and the crooked beak of an owl, that opened with a loud grating 'caw'
close in his ears; and with a 'bo-o-oh!' and a bounce that shook the bed
and made poor Mrs. Sturk jump out of it, and spin round in the curtain,
Sturk's spirit popped back again into his body, which sat up wide awake
that moment.

It is not pretended that at this pa