“Then after yet another ten years had passed, they sent a third time, asking, ‘What dost thou claim to be, Gotama?’

“And Buddha replied, ‘I claim to be the utterance of the most high God.’

“Then they said to him:  ’How is this, that hitherto thou hast proclaimed thyself to be nothing, and now thou declarest thyself to be the very utterance of God?’

“Buddha answered:  `Either I am nothing, or I am the very utterance of God, for between these two all is silence."’

—­Atcham, March 5, 1885

XXIII.  A Haunted House Indeed!

I dreamt that during a tour on the Continent with my friend C. we stayed in a town wherein there was an ancient house of horrible reputation, concerning which we received the following account.  At the top of the house was a suite of rooms, from which no one who entered at night ever again emerged.  No corpse was ever found; but it was said by some that the victims were absorbed bodily by the walls; by others that there were in the rooms a number of pictures in frames, one frame, however, containing a blank canvas, which had the dreadful power, first, of fascinating the beholder, and next of drawing him towards it, so that he was compelled to approach and gaze at it.  Then, by the same hideous enchantment, he was forced to touch it, and the touch was fatal.  For the canvas seized him as a devil-fish seizes its prey, and sucked him in, so that he perished without leaving a trace of himself, or of the manner of his death.  The legend said further that if any person could succeed in passing a night in these rooms and in resisting their deadly influence, the spell would for ever be broken, and no one would thenceforth be sacrificed.

Hearing all this, and being somewhat of the knight-errant order, C. and I determined to face the danger, and, if possible, deliver the town from the enchantment.  We were assured that the attempt would be vain, for that it had already been many times made, and the Devils of the place were always triumphant.  They had the power, we were told, of hallucinating the senses of their victims; we should be subjected to some illusion, and be fatally deceived.  Nevertheless, we were resolved to try what we could do, and in order to acquaint ourselves with the scene of the ordeal, we visited the place in the daytime.  It was a gloomy-looking building, consisting of several vast rooms, filled with lumber of old furniture, worm-eaten and decaying; scaffoldings, which seemed to have been erected for the sake of making repairs and then left; the windows were curtainless, the floors bare, and rats ran hither and thither among the rubbish accumulated in the corners.  Nothing could possibly look more desolate and gruesome.  We saw no pictures; but as we did not explore every part of the rooms, they may have been there without our seeing them.