wilight had long set in, but I can say with certainty that it was
the image of a corpse, and not of a living being, although a cigar was
smoking in its mouth. To be more exact, there was no smoke from the
cigar, but a faintly reddish light was seen. It is characteristic that
I did not sense the odour of tobacco either at that time or later--I
had long given up smoking. Here--I must confess my weakness, but the
illusion was striking--I commenced to speak to the hallucination.
Advancing as closely as possible--the body did not retreat as I
approached, but remained perfectly motionless--I said to the ghost:

"I thank you, father. You know how your son is suffering, and you have
come--you have come to testify to my innocence. I thank you, father.
Give me your hand, and with a firm filial hand-clasp I will respond to
your unexpected visit. Don't you want to? Let me have your hand. Give me
your hand, or I will call you a liar!"

I stretched out my hand, but of course the hallucination did not deem it
worth while to respond, and I was forever deprived of the opportunity of
feeling the touch of a ghost. The cry which I uttered and which so upset
my friend, the jailer, creating some confusion in the prison, was called
forth by the sudden disappearance of the phantom--it was so sudden
that the space in the place where the corpse had been seemed to me more
terrible than the corpse itself.

Such is the power of human imagination when, excited, it creates
phantoms and visions, peopling the bottomless and ever silent emptiness
with them. It is sad to admit that there are people, however, who
believe in ghosts and build upon this belief nonsensical theories about
certain relations between the world of the living and the enigmatic land
inhabited by the dead. I understand that the human ear and eye can be
deceived--but how can the great and lucid human mind fall into such
coarse and ridiculous deception?

I asked the jailer:

"I feel a strange sensation, as though there were the odour of cigar
smoke in my cell. Don't you smell it?"

The jailer sniffed the air conscientiously and replied:

"No I don't. You only imagined it."

If you need any confirmation, here is a splendid proof that all I had
seen, if it existed at all, existed only in the net of my eye.

CHAPTER IX

Something altogether unexpected has happened; the efforts of my friends,
the Warden and his wife, were crowned with success, and for two months I
have be