When the case was heard, it was proved that the mask had been very skillfully made from a portrait of the deceased woman.  The Government gave orders that the matter should be investigated as secretly as possible, and left the punishment of Father K——­ to the spiritual authorities, which was a matter of course, at a time when priests were outside the jurisdiction of the Civil Authorities; and it is needless to say that he was very comfortable during his imprisonment, in a monastery in a part of the country which abounded with game and trout.

The only valuable result of the amusing ghost story was that it brought about a reconciliation between father and son, and the former, as a matter of fact, felt such deep respect for priests and their ghosts in consequence of the apparition that a short time after his wife had left purgatory for the last time in order to talk with him—­he turned Protestant.

Fear

We went up on deck after dinner.  Before us the Mediterranean lay without a ripple and shimmering in the moonlight.  The great ship glided on, casting upward to the star-studded sky a long serpent of black smoke.  Behind us the dazzling white water, stirred by the rapid progress of the heavy bark and beaten by the propeller, foamed, seemed to writhe, gave off so much brilliancy that one could have called it boiling moonlight.

There were six or eight of us silent with admiration and gazing toward far-away Africa whither we were going.  The commandant, who was smoking a cigar with us, brusquely resumed the conversation begun at dinner.

“Yes, I was afraid then.  My ship remained for six hours on that rock, beaten by the wind and with a great hole in the side.  Luckily we were picked up toward evening by an English coaler which sighted us.”

Then a tall man of sunburned face and grave demeanor, one of those men who have evidently traveled unknown and far-away lands, whose calm eye seems to preserve in its depths something of the foreign scenes it has observed, a man that you are sure is impregnated with courage, spoke for the first time.

“You say, commandant, that you were afraid.  I beg to disagree with you.  You are in error as to the meaning of the word and the nature of the sensation that you experienced.  An energetic man is never afraid in the presence of urgent danger.  He is excited, aroused, full of anxiety, but fear is something quite different.”

The commandant laughed and answered:  “Bah!  I assure you that I was afraid.”

Then the man of the tanned countenance addressed us deliberately as follows: 

“Permit me to explain.  Fear—­and the boldest men may feel fear—­is something horrible, an atrocious sensation, a sort of decomposition of the soul, a terrible spasm of brain and heart, the very memory of which brings a shudder of anguish, but when one is brave he feels it neither under fire nor in the presence of sure death nor in the face of any well-known danger.  It springs up under certain abnormal conditions, under certain mysterious influences in the presence of vague peril.  Real fear is a sort of reminiscence of fantastic terror of the past.  A man who believes in ghosts and imagines he sees a specter in the darkness must feel fear in all its horror.