or for any such reason, there is nothing very frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in some such simple way.  And, yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging sound,—­nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,—­I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats’s terrible poem of “Lamia.”

There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.  Creak!  There’s a door ajar; you know you shut them all.

Where can that latch be that rattles so?  Is anybody trying it softly? or, worse than any body, is——? (Cold shiver.) Then a sudden gust that jars all the windows;—­very strange!—­there does not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to.  When it stops, you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead.  Then steps outside,—­a stray animal, no doubt.  All right,—­but a gentle moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle or a cry,—­another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,—­blown over, very likely——­Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!

No,—­night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings.  Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it, of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,—­foxes, and owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?  Our old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops; but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of her lips is full of mystery and fear.

You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it should not be.  Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times.  But it is not so easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons which I will not stop to mention.  I think some of them are rather pleased to get “the Professor” under their ceilings.