y. Wine does not disturb my reason--the little wine I
drank under that unwholesome roof--nor am I a man given to sudden
excitements or untoward impulses.

Yet this thing happened to me.

It was after leaving the pavilion. My companions had all ridden away and
I was standing on the lawn beyond my library windows, recalling my
pleasure with them and gazing somewhat idly, I own, at that bare portion
of the old wall where the tree fell a year ago (the place where the moon
strikes with such a glitter when it rides high, as it did that night),
when--believe it or not, it is all one to me--I became conscious of a
sudden mental dread, inexplicable and alarming, which, seizing me after
an hour of unmixed pleasure and gaiety, took such a firm grip upon my
imagination that I fain would have turned my back upon the night and its
influences, only my eyes would not leave that open space of wall where I
now saw pass--not the shadow, but the veritable body of a large, black,
hungry-looking dog, which, while I looked, turned into the open gateway
connecting with the pavilion and disappeared.

With it went the oppression which held me spell-bound. The ice melted
from my blood; I could move my limbs, and again control my thoughts and
exercise my will.

Forcing a laugh, I whistled to that dog. The lights with which the
banquet had been illuminated were out, and every servant had left the
place; but the tables had not been entirely cleared; and I could well
understand what had drawn this strange animal thither. I whistled then,
and whistled peremptorily; but no dog answered my call. Angry, for the
rules are strict at my stables in regard to wandering brutes, I strode
toward the pavilion. Entering the great gap in the wall where a gate had
once hung, I surveyed the dismal interior before me, with feelings I
could not but consider odd in a strong man like myself. Though the wine
was scarcely dry in the glass which an hour before I had raised in this
very spot amid cheers and laughter, I found it a difficult matter to
reenter there now, in the dead of night, alone and without light.

For this building, harmless as it had always seemed, had been, in a way,
cursed. For no reason that he ever gave, my father had doomed this
ancient adjunct to our home to perpetual solitude and decay. By his will
he had forbidden it to be destroyed--a wish respected by my guardians
and afterward by myself--and though there was nothing to hinder its
being care