hless.

Nothing more chanced for the rest of the night. Nor, indeed, had I
long to wait before the dawn broke. Nor till it was broad daylight did
I quit the haunted house. Before I did so, I revisited the little
blind room in which my servant and myself had been for a time
imprisoned. I had a strong impression--for which I could not
account--that from that room had originated the mechanism of the
phenomena, if I may use the term, which had been experienced in my
chamber. And though I entered it now in the clear day, with the sun
peering through the filmy window, I still felt, as I stood on its
floors, the creep of the horror which I had first there experienced
the night before, and which had been so aggravated by what had passed
in my own chamber. I could not, indeed, bear to stay more than half a
minute within those walls. I descended the stairs, and again I heard
the footfall before me; and when I opened the street door, I thought I
could distinguish a very low laugh. I gained my own home, expecting to
find my runaway servant there; but he had not presented himself, nor
did I hear more of him for three days, when I received a letter from
him, dated from Liverpool to this effect:--

"HONORED SIR,--I humbly entreat your pardon, though I can scarcely
hope that you will think that I deserve it, unless--which Heaven
forbid!--you saw what I did. I feel that it will be years before I can
recover myself; and as to being fit for service, it is out of the
question. I am therefore going to my brother-in-law at Melbourne. The
ship sails to-morrow. Perhaps the long voyage may set me up. I do
nothing now but start and tremble, and fancy IT is behind me. I humbly
beg you, honored sir, to order my clothes, and whatever wages are due
to me, to be sent to my mother's, at Walworth,--John knows her
address."

The letter ended with additional apologies, somewhat incoherent, and
explanatory details as to effects that had been under the writer's
charge. This flight may perhaps warrant a suspicion that the man
wished to go to Australia, and had been somehow or other fraudulently
mixed up with the events of the night. I say nothing in refutation of
that conjecture; rather, I suggest it as one that would seem to many
persons the most probable solution of improbable occurrences. My
belief in my own theory remained unshaken. I returned in the evening
to the house, to bring away in a hack cab the things I had left there,
with my poor dog's bo