at the soil, at the clumps of crested dog’s-tail and stray blades of succulent darnel; I force my attention on a toadstool, whose soft and lowly head gleams sickly white in the moonbeams.  I glance from it to a sleeping close-capped dandelion, from it to a thistle, from it again to a late bush vetch, and then, willy-nilly, to the accursed elm.  My God!  What a change.  It wasn’t like that when I passed it at noon.  It was just an ordinary tree then, but now, now—­and what is that—­that sinister bundle—­suspended from one of its curling branches?  A cold sweat bursts out on me, my knees tremble, my hair begins to rise on end.  Swinging round, I am about to rush away—­blindly rush away—­hither, thither, anywhere—­anywhere out of sight of that tree and of all the hideous possibilities it promises to materialize for me.  I have not taken five strides, however, before I am pulled sharply up by the sounds of horse’s hoofs—­of hoofs on the hard gravel, away in the distance.  They speedily grow nearer.  A horse is galloping, galloping towards me along the broad carriage drive.  Nearer, nearer and nearer it comes!  Who is it?  WHAT is it?  A deadly nausea seizes me, I swerve, totter, reel, and am only prevented from falling by the timely interference of a pine.  The concussion with its leviathan trunk clears my senses.  All my faculties become wonderfully and painfully alert.  I would give my very soul if it were not so—­if I could but fall asleep or faint.  The sound of the hoofs is very much nearer now, so near indeed that I may see the man—­Heaven grant it may be only a man after all—­any moment.  Ah! my heart gives a great sickly jerk.  Something has shot into view.  There, not fifty yards from me, where the road curves, and the break in the foliage overhead admits a great flood of moonlight.  I recognize the “thing” at once; it’s not a man, it’s nothing human, it’s the picture I know so well and dread so much, the portrait of Horace Wimpole, that hangs in the main hall—­and it’s mounted on a coal-black horse with wildly flying mane and foaming mouth.  On and on they come, thud, thud, thud!  The man is not dressed as a rider, but is wearing the costume in the picture—­i.e. that of a macaroni!  A nut!  More fit for a lady’s seminary than a fine, old English mansion.

“Something beside me rustles—­rustles angrily, and I know, I can feel, it is the bundle on the branch—­the ghastly, groaning, creaking, croaking caricature of Sir Algernon.  The horseman comes up to me—­our eyes meet—­I am looking in those of a dead—­of a long since dead man—­my blood freezes.

“He flashes past me—­thud, thud, thud!  A bend in the road, and he vanishes from sight.  But I can still hear him, still hear the mad patter of his horse’s hoofs as they bear him onward, lifeless, fleshless, weightless, to his ancient home.  God pity the souls that know no rest.

“How I got back to the house I hardly know.  I believe it was with my eyes shut, and I am certain I ran all the way.