t gelatinous face assumed a dozen--a score--a
hundred--aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that
melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange and
yet not strange.

I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and
infantile, and other features old and young, coarse and refined,
familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed a degraded
counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen in
the School of Design museum, and another time I thought I caught the
raw-boned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in
Carrington Harris's house. It was frightful beyond conception; toward
the last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickered
close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was
spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought against
themselves and strove to form contours like those of my uncle's kindly
face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he tried
to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccupped a farewell from my own
parched throat as I lurched out into the street; a thin stream of grease
following me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk.

* * * * *

The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking
street, and in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked
aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street,
and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemed
to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and
unwholesome wonder. Then gray dawn unfolded wetly from the east,
silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and beckoning
me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in the
end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and entered
that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still
swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I
dared not speak.

The grease was gone, for the moldy floor was porous. And in front of the
fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled-up form traced in niter.
I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my neglected hat, and
the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I could
scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought
trickled back, and I knew that I had wit