over me. But how could my
manner be so faithful an index to my impressions?"

"I know the signs of the visitation," returned the stranger, gravely;
"they are not to be mistaken by one of my experience."

All the gentleman present then declared that they could comprehend, and
had felt, what the stranger had described.

"According to one of our national superstitions," said Mervale, the
Englishman who had first addressed Glyndon, "the moment you so feel your
blood creep, and your hair stand on end, some one is walking over the
spot which shall be your grave."

"There are in all lands different superstitions to account for so common
an occurrence," replied the stranger: "one sect among the Arabians holds
that at that instant God is deciding the hour either of your death,
or of some one dear to you. The African savage, whose imagination is
darkened by the hideous rites of his gloomy idolatry, believes that the
Evil Spirit is pulling you towards him by the hair: so do the Grotesque
and the Terrible mingle with each other."

"It is evidently a mere physical accident,--a derangement of the
stomach, a chill of the blood," said a young Neapolitan, with whom
Glyndon had formed a slight acquaintance.

"Then why is it always coupled in all nations with some superstitious
presentiment or terror,--some connection between the material frame and
the supposed world without us? For my part, I think--"

"Ay, what do you think, sir?" asked Glyndon, curiously.

"I think," continued the stranger, "that it is the repugnance and
horror with which our more human elements recoil from something, indeed,
invisible, but antipathetic to our own nature; and from a knowledge of
which we are happily secured by the imperfection of our senses."

"You are a believer in spirits, then?" said Mervale, with an incredulous
smile.

"Nay, it was not precisely of spirits that I spoke; but there may be
forms of matter as invisible and impalpable to us as the animalculae
in the air we breathe,--in the water that plays in yonder basin. Such
beings may have passions and powers like our own--as the animalculae to
which I have compared them. The monster that lives and dies in a drop of
water--carnivorous, insatiable, subsisting on the creatures minuter than
himself--is not less deadly in his wrath, less ferocious in his nature,
than the tiger of the desert. There may be things around us that would
be dangerous and hostile to men, if Providence had not placed