ct, "How many
horrors may have been perpetrated on this very spot where I now lie!"
Meanwhile, the moon shone into my room in a doubtful, suspicious manner;
all kinds of uncalled-for shapes quivered on the walls, and as I raised
myself in bed and glanced fearfully toward them, I beheld--

There is nothing so uncanny as when a man accidentally sees his own face
by moonlight in a mirror. At the same instant there struck a
deep-booming, yawning bell, and that so slowly and wearily that after
the twelfth stroke I firmly believed that twelve full hours must have
passed and that it would begin to strike twelve all over again. Between
the last and next to the last tones, there struck in very abruptly, as
if irritated and scolding, another bell, which was apparently out of
patience with the slowness of its colleague. As the two iron tongues
were silenced, and the stillness of death sank over the whole house, I
suddenly seemed to hear, in the corridor before my chamber, something
halting and shuffling along, like the unsteady steps of an old man. At
last my door opened, and there entered slowly the late departed Dr. Saul
Ascher. A cold fever ran through me. I trembled like an ivy leaf and
scarcely dared to gaze upon the ghost. He appeared as usual, with the
same transcendental-grey long coat, the same abstract legs, and the same
mathematical face; only this latter was a little yellower than usual,
the mouth, which formerly described two angles of 22-1/2 degrees, was
pinched together, and the circles around the eyes had a somewhat greater
radius. Tottering, and supporting himself as usual upon his Malacca
cane, he approached me, and said in his usual drawling accent but in a
friendly manner, "Do not be afraid, nor believe that I am a ghost. It is
a deception of your imagination, if you believe that you see me as a
ghost. What is a ghost? Define one. Deduce for me the conditions of the
possibility of a ghost. What reasonable connection is there between such
an apparition and reason? Reason, I say, _Reason!"_ Here the ghost
proceeded to analyze reason, cited from Kant's _Critique of Pure
Reason_, part II, section I, book 2, chap. 3, the distinction between
phenomena and noumena, then went on to construct a hypothetical system
of ghosts, piled one syllogism on another, and concluded with the
logical proof that there are absolutely no ghosts. Meanwhile the cold
sweat ran down my back, my teeth clattered like castanets, and from very