icily for an instant. Who does not recall to mind moments and
places when he seems to have stepped out of the real living world into
some grey, uncanny land of dreams, where the very air is thick and
haunted with some quality of unknown fear and unknown oppression? So it
seemed to me when I first saw the Skull and Spectacles with its
death's-head smirking welcome and the river mud oozing about its
timbers. But the place piqued me while it frightened me, and I pulled my
courage together like a coat, buttoned it metaphorically about me, and
entered.

Like many another enterprise upon which we enter with a beating heart,
the preface was infinitely more alarming than the succeeding matter.
There was no one in the bar-parlour when I entered save a sailor, who
was sleeping a drunken, stertorous sleep in a corner. From the private
parlour beyond, when I entered, a man came out, a burly seafaring man,
who asked me shortly, but not uncivilly, what I wanted. I called for a
jug of ale. He brought it to me without a word, together with a hunch of
bread, set them before me, and left me alone again, going into his
snuggery at the back, and drawing the door after him jealously.

I sat there for some little time, sipping my ale and munching my
bread--and indeed the ale was excellent; I have never tasted better--and
looking at the grimy wall, greasy with the rubbings of many heads and
shoulders, scrawled all over with sums, whose addition seemed to have
mightily perplexed the taproom arithmeticians, and defiled with
inscriptions of a foul, loose-witted, waterside lubricity that made me
blush and feel qualmish. But I found a furtive enjoyment in the odd
place, and the snoring sailor, and the low plashing of the estuary
against the decaying timbers, and the silence of solitude all around.

Presently the door was pushed open; but before anyone could come in I
was made to jump from my seat in a kind of terror, for a voice sang out
sharply just above my head and startled me prodigiously.

'Kiss me--kiss me--kiss me--kiss me!' the strange voice screamed out.
'Kiss me on the lips and eyes and throat! kiss me on the breast! kiss
me--kiss me--kiss me!'

I turned up my eyes and noted above my head what I had not seen
before--a cage swinging from the rafters, and in it a small green
parrot, with fiery eyes that glowed like blazing rubies.

It went rattling on at an amazing rate, adjuring its hearers to kiss it
on all parts of the body with a