pressive hush.

"'Do you know?' it said again. 'Well, I will tell you. I'm going to kill
you right away, so that your spirit--it's all nonsense to talk about
souls, such as you have no soul--will be earth-bound here--here for
ever--and will be a perpetual source of amusement to all of us animal
ghosts.'

"It then began to jabber ferociously, and, crouching down, prepared to
spring.

"'For Heaven's sake,' I shrieked, 'for Heaven's sake.'

"But I might as well have appealed to the wind. It had no sense of
mercy.

"'He, he!' it screamed. 'What a joke--what a splendid joke. Your wit
never seems to degenerate, Hugesson! I'm wondering if you will be as
funny when you're a ghost. Get ready. I'm coming, coming,' and as the
sky deepened to an awe-inspiring black, and the stars grew larger,
brighter, fiercer; and the great lone deserts appealed to me with a
force unequalled before, it sprang through the air.

"A singing in my ears and a great bloody mist rose before my eyes. The
wailing and screeching of a million souls was borne in loud protracted
echoings through the drum of my ears. Men and women with evil faces rose
up from crag and boulder to spit and tear at me. I saw creatures of such
damning ugliness that my soul screamed aloud with terror. And then from
the mountain tops the bolt of heaven was let loose. Every spirit was
swept away like chaff before the burst of wind that, hurling and
shrieking, bore down upon me. I gave myself up for lost. I felt all the
agonies of suffocation, my lungs were torn from my palpitating body; my
legs wrenched round in their sockets; my feet whirled upwards in that
gust of devilish air. All--excruciating, damning pain--and _pro
tempore_--I knew no more."

* * * * *

N.B.--It was subsequently ascertained, by my friend the late Mr. Supton,
that a man named Hugesson, who had been for a short time head keeper at
the Zoological Gardens, had been found dead, in bed, by his landlady,
with a look on his face so awful that she had fled shrieking from the
room. The death was, of course, attributed to syncope, but my
friend--who, by the way, had never heard of Hugesson before he received
the foregoing account through the medium of planchette--told me, and I
agreed with him, that from similar cases that had come within his
experience, it was most probable that Hugesson had in reality projected
himself, and had perished in the manner described.

No more improbab