As ’twere with a percussion cap
  The trouble’s climax capping;
It seemed a party dried and grim
Of mummies had come to visit him,
Each getting off from every limb
  Its multitudinous wrapping;
Scratchings sometimes the walls ran round,
The merest penny-weights of sound;
Sometimes ’twas only by the pound
  They carried on their dealing,
A thumping ’neath the parlor floor,
Thump-bump-thump-bumping o’er and o’er, 350
As if the vegetables in store
(Quiet and orderly before)
  Were all together peeling;
You would have thought the thing was done
By the spirit of some son of a gun,
  And that a forty-two-pounder,
Or that the ghost which made such sounds
Could be none other than John Pounds,
  Of Ragged Schools the founder. 
Through three gradations of affright, 360
The awful noises reached their height;
  At first they knocked nocturnally,
Then, for some reason, changing quite,
(As mourners, after six months’ flight,
Turn suddenly from dark to light,)
  Began to knock diurnally,
And last, combining all their stocks,
(Scotland was ne’er so full of Knox,)
Into one Chaos (father of Nox,)
Nocte pluit—­they showered knocks, 370
  And knocked, knocked, knocked, eternally;
Ever upon the go, like buoys,
(Wooden sea-urchins,) all Knott’s joys,
They turned to troubles and a noise
  That preyed on him internally.

Soon they grew wider in their scope;
Whenever Knott a door would ope,
It would ope not, or else elope
And fly back (curbless as a trope
Once started down a stanza’s slope 380
By a bard that gave it too much rope—­)
  Like a clap of thunder slamming: 
And, when kind Jenny brought his hat,
(She always, when he walked, did that,)
Just as upon his heart it sat,
Submitting to his settling pat,
Some unseen hand would jam it flat,
Or give it such a furious bat
  That eyes and nose went cramming
Up out of sight, and consequently, 390
As when in life it paddled free,
  His beaver caused much damning;
If these things seem o’erstrained to be,
Read the account of Doctor Dee,
’Tis in our college library: 
Read Wesley’s circumstantial plea,
And Mrs. Crowe, more like a bee,
Sucking the nightshade’s honeyed fee,
And Stilling’s Pneumatology;
Consult Scot, Glanvil, grave Wie- 400
rus and both Mathers; further see,
Webster, Casaubon, James First’s trea-
tise, a right royal Q.E.D. 
Writ with the moon in perigee,
Bodin de la Demonomanie—­
(Accent that last line gingerly)
All full of learning as the sea
Of fishes, and all disagree,
Save in Sathanas apage!
Or, what will surely put a flea 410
In unbelieving ears—­with glee,
Out of a paper (sent to me
By some friend who forgot to P ... 
A ...  Y ...—­I use cryptography