read “The Woman in White,” “The Strange Story”—­not to mention that story “Stranger than Fiction” in the Cornhill Magazine—­that story for which three credible witnesses are ready to vouch.  I have had messages from the dead; and not only from the dead, but from people who never existed at all.  I own I am in a state of much bewilderment:  but, if you please, will proceed with my simple, my artless story.

Well, then.  We passed from Shepherd’s Inn into Holborn, and looked for a while at Woodgate’s bric-a-brac shop, which I never can pass without delaying at the windows—­indeed, if I were going to be hung, I would beg the cart to stop, and let me have one look more at that delightful omnium gatherum.  And passing Woodgate’s, we come to Gale’s little shop, “No. 47,” which is also a favorite haunt of mine.

Mr. Gale happened to be at his door, and as we exchanged salutations, “Mr. Pinto,” I said, “will you like to see a real curiosity in this curiosity shop?  Step into Mr. Gale’s little back room.”

In that little back parlor there are Chinese gongs; there are old Saxe and Sevres plates; there is Furstenberg, Carl Theodor, Worcester, Amstel, Nankin and other jimcrockery.  And in the corner what do you think there is?  There is an actual guillotine.  If you doubt me, go and see—­Gale, High Holborn, No. 47.  It is a slim instrument, much slighter than those which they make now;—­some nine feet high, narrow, a pretty piece of upholstery enough.  There is the hook over which the rope used to play which unloosened the dreadful ax above; and look! dropped into the orifice where the head used to go—­there is the ax itself, all rusty, with A great notch in the blade.

As Pinto looked at it—­Mr. Gale was not in the room, I recollect; happening to have been just called out by a customer who offered him three pound fourteen and sixpence for a blue Shepherd in pate tendre,—­Mr. Pinto gave a little start, and seemed crispe for a moment.  Then he looked steadily toward one of those great porcelain stools which you see in gardens—­and—­it seemed to me—­I tell you I won’t take my affidavit—­I may have been maddened by the six glasses I took of that pink elixir—­I may have been sleep-walking:  perhaps am as I write now—­I may have been under the influence of that astounding medium into whose hands I had fallen—­ but I vow I heard Pinto say, with rather a ghastly grin at the porcelain stool,

     “Nay, nefer shague your gory locks at me,
      Dou canst not say I did it.”

(He pronounced it, by the way, I DIT it, by which I KNOW that Pinto was a German.)

I heard Pinto say those very words, and sitting on the porcelain stool I saw, dimly at first, then with an awful distinctness—­a ghost—­an eidolon—­a form—­A headless man seated with his head in his lap, which wore an expression of piteous surprise.