Mr. Jaffrey then went on to give me a history of Andy’s first six months, omitting no detail however insignificant or irrelevant.  This history I would in turn inflict upon the reader, if I were only certain that he is one of those dreadful parents who, under the aegis of friendship, bore you at a street-corner with that remarkable thing which Freddy said the other day, and insist on singing to you, at an evening party, the Iliad of Tommy’s woes.

But to inflict this enfantillage upon the unmarried reader would be an act of wanton cruelty.  So I pass over that part of Andy’s biography, and for the same reason make no record of the next four or five interviews I had with Mr. Jaffrey.  It will be sufficient to state that Andy glided from extreme infancy to early youth with astonishing celerity—­at the rate of one year per night, if I remember correctly; and—­must I confess it?—­before the week came to an end, this invisible hobgoblin of a boy was only little less of a reality to me than to Mr. Jaffrey.

At first I had lent myself to the old dreamer’s whim with a keen perception of the humor of the thing; but by and by I found that I was talking and thinking of Miss Mehetabel’s son as though he were a veritable personage.  Mr. Jaffrey spoke of the child with such an air of conviction!—­as if Andy were playing among his toys in the next room, or making mud-pies down in the yard.  In these conversations, it should be observed, the child was never supposed to be present, except on that single occasion when Mr. Jaffrey leaned over the cradle.  After one of our seances I would lie awake until the small hours, thinking of the boy, and then fall asleep only to have indigestible dreams about him.  Through the day, and sometimes in the midst of complicated calculations, I would catch myself wondering what Andy was up to now!  There was no shaking him off; he became an inseparable nightmare to me; and I felt that if I remained much longer at Bayley’s Four-Corners I should turn into just such another bald-headed, mild-eyed visionary as Silas Jaffrey.

Then the tavern was a grewsome old shell any way, full of unaccountable noises after dark—­rustlings of garments along unfrequented passages, and stealthy footfalls in unoccupied chambers overhead.  I never knew of an old house without these mysterious noises.  Next to my bedroom was a musty, dismantled apartment, in one corner of which, leaning against the wainscot, was a crippled mangle, with its iron crank tilted in the air like the elbow of the late Mr. Clem Jaffrey.  Sometimes,

     “In the dead vast and middle of the night,”

I used to hear sounds as if some one were turning that rusty crank on the sly.  This occurred only on particularly cold nights, and I conceived the uncomfortable idea that it was the thin family ghosts, from the neglected graveyard in the cornfield, keeping themselves warm by running each other through the mangle.  There was a haunted air about the whole place that made it easy for me to believe in the existence of a phantasm like Miss Mehetabel’s son, who, after all, was less unearthly than Mr. Jaffrey himself, and seemed more properly an inhabitant of this globe than the toothless ogre who kept the inn, not to mention the silent Witch of Endor that cooked our meals for us over the bar-room fire.