On the other hand, carry that man across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many years ago, and rumors of ugly spots on the walls,—­the old man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the country-people have called it “the haunted house,”—­the owners haven’t been able to let it since the last tenants left on account of the noises,—­so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,—­take the man who didn’t mind the real risk of the cars to that old house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there alone,—­how do you think he will like it?  He doesn’t believe one word of ghosts,—­but then he knows, that, whether waking or sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with ghastly images.  It is not what we believe, as I said before, that frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.  A principle that reaches a good way, if I am not mistaken.  I say, then, that, if these odd sounds coming from the little gentleman’s chamber sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way.  The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that was founded on the landlady’s story of his having a pile of gold; it was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious and afford a pretext for plundering them.  As for the sound like a woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman’s voice; for, in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly, he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what they call the voce umana stop.  If he moves his bed round to get out of draughts, or for any such reason, there is nothing very frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in some such simple way.  And yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging sound,—­nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,—­I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats’s terrible poem of “Lamia.”

There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.