“While lying in this state, strange to say; without at first a suspicion of anything supernatural, on a sudden I saw an old man, rather stout and square, in a sort of roan-red dressing-gown, and with a black cap on his head, moving stiffly and slowly in a diagonal direction, from the recess, across the floor of the bedroom, passing my bed at the foot, and entering the lumber-closet at the left.  He had something under his arm; his head hung a little at one side; and, merciful God! when I saw his face.”

Tom stopped for a while, and then said——­

“That awful countenance, which living or dying I never can forget, disclosed what he was.  Without turning to the right or left, he passed beside me, and entered the closet by the bed’s head.

“While this fearful and indescribable type of death and guilt was passing, I felt that I had no more power to speak or stir than if I had been myself a corpse.  For hours after it had disappeared, I was too terrified and weak to move.  As soon as daylight came, I took courage, and examined the room, and especially the course which the frightful intruder had seemed to take, but there was not a vestige to indicate anybody’s having passed there; no sign of any disturbing agency visible among the lumber that strewed the floor of the closet.

“I now began to recover a little.  I was fagged and exhausted, and at last, overpowered by a feverish sleep.  I came down late; and finding you out of spirits, on account of your dreams about the portrait, whose original I am now certain disclosed himself to me, I did not care to talk about the infernal vision.  In fact, I was trying to persuade myself that the whole thing was an illusion, and I did not like to revive in their intensity the hated impressions of the past night—­or to risk the constancy of my scepticism, by recounting the tale of my sufferings.

“It required some nerve, I can tell you, to go to my haunted chamber next night, and lie down quietly in the same bed,” continued Tom.  “I did so with a degree of trepidation, which, I am not ashamed to say, a very little matter would have sufficed to stimulate to downright panic.  This night, however, passed off quietly enough, as also the next; and so too did two or three more.  I grew more confident, and began to fancy that I believed in the theories of spectral illusions, with which I had at first vainly tried to impose upon my convictions.

“The apparition had been, indeed, altogether anomalous.  It had crossed the room without any recognition of my presence:  I had not disturbed it, and it had no mission to me.  What, then, was the imaginable use of its crossing the room in a visible shape at all?  Of course it might have been in the closet instead of going there, as easily as it introduced itself into the recess without entering the chamber in a shape discernible by the senses.  Besides, how the deuce had I seen it?  It was a dark night; I had no candle; there was no fire; and yet I saw it as distinctly, in colouring and outline, as ever I beheld human form!  A cataleptic dream would explain it all; and I was determined that a dream it should be.