hrough the excitement caused by my
discovery of the home of the genii--I lay awake, my whole thoughts
concentrated in one soul-absorbing desire, the passionate desire to
see the fairy of Hennersley--I had never heard of ghosts--and hear its
story. My bedroom was half-way down the corridor leading from the head
of the main staircase to the extremity of the wing.

After I said good-night I did not see my aunts again till the
morning--they never by any chance visited me after I was in bed. Hence
I knew, when I had retired for the night, I should not see a human
face nor hear a human voice for nearly twelve hours. This--when I
thought of the genii with its golden beams of light and scent of
heliotrope--did not trouble me; it was only when my thoughts would not
run in this channel that I felt any fear, and that fear was not of the
darkness itself, but of what the darkness suggested.

On this particular night, for the first few hours, I was sublimely
happy, and then a strange restlessness seized me. I was obsessed with
a wish to see the flower-garden. For some minutes, stimulated by a
dread of what my aunts would think of such a violation of
conventionality on the part of a child, I combated furiously with the
desire; but at length the longing was so great, so utterly and wholly
irresistible, that I succumbed, and, getting quietly out of bed, made
my way noiselessly into the corridor.

All was dark and still--stiller than I had ever known it before.
Without any hesitation I plunged forward, in the direction of the
wingless side of the house, where there was a long, narrow, stained
window that commanded an immediate prospect of the white garden.

I had seldom looked out of it, as up to the present this side of the
house had little attraction for me; but all was changed now; and, as I
felt my way cautiously along the corridor, a thousand and one fanciful
notions of what I might see surged through my brain.

I came to the end of the corridor, I descended half a dozen stairs, I
got to the middle of the gallery overlooking the large entrance
hall--below me, above me, on all sides of me, was Stygian darkness. I
stopped, and there suddenly rang out, apparently from close at hand, a
loud, clear, most appallingly clear, blood-curdling cry, which,
beginning in a low key, ended in a shriek so horrid, harsh, and
piercing, that I felt my heart shrivel up within me, and in sheer
desperation I buried my fingers in my ears to deaden the