if this goes on much longer I shall begin to think
I'm going mad. I have had enough, and more than enough, of magic
mirrors for one night--it's high time I got into bed." He strove to
rise from his chair--to move; he was unable to do either; some
strange, tyrannical force held him a prisoner.

A change now took place in the shadow; the blurr dissipated, and the
clearly defined outlines of an object--an object that made Mr. Vance
perfectly sick with apprehension--slowly disclosed themselves. His
suspicions were verified--it was the HAND!--the hand--no longer
skeleton, but covered with green, mouldering flesh--feeling its way
slyly and stealthily towards him--towards the back of his chair! He
noted the murderous twitching of its short, flat finger-tips, the
monstrous muscles of its hideous thumb, and the great, clumsy hollows
of its clammy palm. It closed in upon him; its cold, slimy, detestable
skin touched his coat--his shoulder--his neck--his head! It pressed
him down, squashed, suffocated him! He saw it all in the glass--and
then an extraordinary thing happened. Mr. Vance suddenly became
animated. He got up and peeped furtively round. Chairs, bed, wardrobe,
had all disappeared--so had the bedroom--and he found himself in a
small, bare, comfortless, queerly constructed apartment without a
door, and with only a narrow slit of a window somewhere near the
ceiling.

He had in one of his hands a knife with a long, keen blade, and his
whole mind was bent on murder. Creeping stealthily forward, he
approached a corner of the room, where he now saw, for the first
time--a mattress--a mattress on which lay a huddled-up form. What the
Thing was--whether human or animal--Mr. Vance did not know--did not
care--all he felt was that it was there for him to kill--that he
loathed and hated it--hated it with a hatred such as nothing else
could have produced. Tiptoeing gently up to it, he bent down, and,
lifting his knife high above his head, plunged it into the Thing's
body with all the force he could command.

* * * * *

He recrossed the room, and found himself once more in his apartment at
the inn. He looked for the skeleton hand--it was not where he had left
it--it had vanished. Then he glanced at the mirror, and on its
brilliantly polished surface saw--not his own face--but the face of
the gardener, the man who had given him the hand! Features, colour,
hair--all--all were identical--wonderfully, hid