it were reaching out to me.  And I had a clear recollection that just as I had been sinking into that strange state of unconsciousness, I had been under the impression that the creature was writhing and twisting, as though it had suddenly become instinct with life.  Under the circumstances, these reflections were not pleasant.  I wished Tress had not talked that nonsense about the thing being haunted.  It was surely sufficient to know that it was drugged and poisonous, without anything else.

I replaced it in the sandalwood box.  I locked the box in a cabinet.  Quite apart from the question as to whether that pipe was or was not haunted, I know it haunted me.  It was with me in a figurative—­which was worse than actual—­sense all the day.  Still worse, it was with me all the night.  It was with me in my dreams.  Such dreams!  Possibly I had not yet wholly recovered from the effects of that insidious drug, but, whether or no, it was very wrong of Tress to set my thoughts into such a channel.  He knows that I am of a highly imaginative temperament, and that it is easier to get morbid thoughts into my mind than to get them out again.  Before that night was through I wished very heartily that I had never seen the pipe!  I woke from one nightmare to fall into another.  One dreadful dream was with me all the time—­of a hideous, green reptile which advanced toward me out of some awful darkness, slowly, inch by inch, until it clutched me round the neck, and, gluing its lips to mine, sucked the life’s blood out of my veins as it embraced me with a slimy kiss.  Such dreams are not restful.  I woke anything but refreshed when the morning came.  And when I got up and dressed I felt that, on the whole, it would perhaps have been better if I never had gone to bed.  My nerves were unstrung, and I had that generally tremulous feeling which is, I believe, an inseparable companion of the more advanced stages of dipsomania.  I ate no breakfast.  I am no breakfast eater as a rule, but that morning I ate absolutely nothing.

“If this sort of thing is to continue, I will let Tress have his pipe again.  He may have the laugh of me, but anything is better than this.”

It was with almost funereal forebodings that I went to the cabinet in which I had placed the sandalwood box.  But when I opened it my feelings of gloom partially vanished.  Of what phantasies had I been guilty!  It must have been an entire delusion on my part to have supposed that those tentacula had ever been twined about the bowl.  The creature was in exactly the same position in which I had left it the day before—­as, of course, I knew it would be—­poised, as if about to spring.  I was telling myself how foolish I had been to allow myself to dwell for a moment on Tress’s words, when Martin Brasher was shown in.

Brasher is an old friend of mine.  We have a common ground—­ghosts.  Only we approach them from different points of view.  He takes the scientific—­psychological—­inquiry side.  He is always anxious to hear of a ghost, so that he may have an opportunity of “showing it up.”