stand staring at it, mute and helpless;
but the sound of approaching carriage-wheels breaking the spell, she
rushed to the fireplace and pulled the bell vigorously. As she did so,
there came a loud chuckle from the chest, and all the walls of the room
seemed to shake with laughter.

Of course everyone laughed when Mrs MacNeill related what had happened.
The chest was minutely examined, and as it was found to contain nothing
but some mats that had been stored away in it the previous day, the
finger was forthwith declared to have been an optical illusion, and Mrs
MacNeill was, for the time being, ridiculed into believing it was so
herself. For the next two or three days nothing occurred; nothing, in
fact, until one night when Mrs MacNeill and her daughters heard the
queerest of noises downstairs, proceeding apparently from the
dining-room--heavy, flopping footsteps, bumps as if a body was being
dragged backwards and forwards across the floor, crashes as if all the
crockery in the house had been piled in a mass on the floor, loud peals
of malevolent laughter, and then--silence.

The following night, the disturbances being repeated, Mrs MacNeill
summoned up courage to go downstairs and peep into the room. The noises
were still going on when she arrived at the door, but, the moment she
opened it, they ceased and there was nothing to be seen. A day or two
afterwards, when she was again alone in the dining-room and the evening
shadows were beginning to make their appearance, she glanced anxiously
at the chest, and--there was the finger. Losing her self-possession at
once, and yielding to a paroxysm of the wildest, the most ungovernable
terror, she opened her mouth to shriek. Not a sound came; the cry that
had been generated in her lungs died away ere it reached her larynx, and
she relapsed into a kind of cataleptic condition, in which all her
faculties were acutely alert but her limbs and organs of speech palsied.

She expected every instant that the chest-lid would fly open and that
the baleful thing lurking within would spring upon her. The torture she
suffered from such anticipations was little short of hell, and was
rendered all the more maddening by occasional quiverings of the lid,
which brought all her expectations to a climax. Now, now at any rate,
she assured herself, the moment had come when the acme of horrordom
would be bounced upon her and she would either die or go mad. But no;
her agonies were again and again