should not some
invisible life of a high grade hold a secure position on the earth?

Pondering thus, I had been startled not a little by coming now and
again on facts that seemed to bear this out. Strange tracks through
untrodden grass suggested footsteps of the unseen. Flattened spaces
of peculiar shape in the standing rye, where human beings could not
have intruded, looked marvellously like human visitation. Or I lay
concealed and watched the crows in a road-side field. What was it
caused them to look up suddenly and flap away on sooty-fringed wings?
No bird, beast, or man came. Then the rats, scampering about under a
dock like so many gaunt Virginia swine: all at once came a flurry of
whisking tails, and they were off! Yet I had not stirred, nor did
anything move on the dock above. Nevertheless all seemed to realize a
common danger, a noise of some kind,--perhaps a step? Again, you sit
like a block while a snake basks unconscious in the sun, and may watch
many hours without event; but sometimes it happens that he raises his
head, quivers for an instant his double tongue, and slides off the
stump into a bush. At such times put your ear to the earth. Do you not
distinguish--or is it all imagination--a sound, a brushing?

It availed me little, then, that I should have considered the subject,
or have even gone the length of debating how a man might attain
invisibility. Now that I had a tangible proof of the existence of such
beings, I was crushed by misgivings. Like many a man before the
supposed impossible, I questioned my own sanity. As to the impression,
however, the object I had touched or fancied I had touched was at once
hard and soft, smooth and rough; I recalled it as each of these in
turn, for it was moving, and at the moment of contact bounded away as
if at the shock of a galvanic current. To my excited mind the dusky
woods were becoming oppressive, and so, like the hawk, but slowly and
pondering, I betook myself home.

Who that has walked or run through autumn woods at night has not
sometimes looked curiously over his shoulder at the sound of following
steps? It always proves to be dry leaves whirled after you in your
rapid course; but this evening my gait was slow, and the leaves of
last year were hard to find; nor could I account, except on the ground
of nervous illusion, for the pattering that followed in my rear. Yet
there it was, albeit so gentle that had I not stretched every sense to
the utmost I am