ed by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily
attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.

This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical
practise; and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his
elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the way
in which the victims--ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely
shunned house could now be rented to no others--would babble
maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied
to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century
before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical
data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return
from the war, to the first-hand account of Doctors Chase and Whitmarsh.
Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and
that he was glad of my own interest--an open-minded and sympathetic
interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others
would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he
felt that the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities, and
worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and
macabre.

For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound
seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to
accumulate as much more as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer
Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916;
and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an
authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected.
When, however, I asked them what connection with France or its language
the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and
ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say
was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of
might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son
Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known the
legend, but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins,
seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird
significance to the French raving of Rhoby Harris, which she had so
often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been
at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783,
and had seen M