With these, thoughts, he cautiously sprung the iron under foot, peeped in, and, seeing all clear, boldly re-entered the apartment.  He went straight to a high, narrow door in the opposite wall.  The key was in the lock.  Opening the door, there hung several coats, small-clothes, pairs of silk stockings, and hats of the deceased.  With little difficulty Israel selected from these the complete suit in which he had last seen his once jovial friend.  Carefully closing the door, and carrying the suit with him, he was returning towards the chimney, when he saw the Squire’s silver-headed cane leaning against a corner of the wainscot.  Taking this also, he stole back to his cell.

Slipping off his own clothing, he deliberately arrayed himself in the borrowed raiment, silk small-clothes and all, then put on the cocked hat, grasped the silver-headed cane in his right hand, and moving his small shaving-glass slowly up and down before him, so as by piecemeal to take in his whole figure, felt convinced that he would well pass for Squire Woodcock’s genuine phantom.  But after the first feeling of self-satisfaction with his anticipated success had left him, it was not without some superstitious embarrassment that Israel felt himself encased in a dead man’s broadcloth; nay, in the very coat in which the deceased had no doubt fallen down in his fit.  By degrees he began to feel almost as unreal and shadowy as the shade whose part he intended to enact.

Waiting long and anxiously till darkness came, and then till he thought it was fairly midnight, he stole back into the closet, and standing for a moment uneasily in the middle of the floor, thinking over all the risks he might run, he lingered till he felt himself resolute and calm.  Then groping for the door leading into the hall, put his hand on the knob and turned it.  But the door refused to budge.  Was it locked?  The key was not in.  Turning the knob once more, and holding it so, he pressed firmly against the door.  It did not move.  More firmly still, when suddenly it burst open with a loud crackling report.  Being cramped, it had stuck in the sill.  Less than three seconds passed when, as Israel was groping his way down the long wide hall towards the large staircase at its opposite end, he heard confused hurrying noises from the neighboring rooms, and in another instant several persons, mostly in night-dresses, appeared at their chamber-doors, thrusting out alarmed faces, lit by a lamp held by one of the number, a rather elderly lady in widow’s weeds, who by her appearance seemed to have just risen from a sleepless chair, instead of an oblivious couch.  Israel’s heart beat like a hammer; his face turned like a sheet.  But bracing himself, pulling his hat lower down over his eyes, settling his head in the collar of his coat, he advanced along the defile of wildly staring faces.  He advanced with a slow and stately step, looked neither to the right nor the left, but went solemnly forward on his now faintly