“Justice on earth is often powerless, but I implore heavenly justice, I implore the justice of life which never forgives, I implore all the higher laws under whose authority man lives.  May the guilty one not escape his deserved punishment!  His punishment!”

Moved by my sobs, my listeners there and then expressed their zeal and readiness to work for my liberation, and thus at least partly redeem the injustice heaped upon me.  I apologised and returned to my cell.

Evidently my old organism cannot bear such agitation any longer; besides, it is hard even for a strong man to picture in his imagination certain images without risking the loss of his reason.  Only in this way can I explain the strange hallucination which appeared before my fatigued eyes in the solitude of my cell.  As though benumbed I gazed aimlessly at the tightly closed door, when suddenly it seemed to me that some one was standing behind me.  I had felt this deceptive sensation before, so I did not turn around for some time.  But when I turned around at last I saw—­in the distance, between the crucifix and my portrait, about a quarter of a yard above the floor—­the body of my father, as though hanging in the air.  It is hard for me to give the details, for twilight had long set in, but I can say with certainty that it was the image of a corpse, and not of a living being, although a cigar was smoking in its mouth.  To be more exact, there was no smoke from the cigar, but a faintly reddish light was seen.  It is characteristic that I did not sense the odour of tobacco either at that time or later—­I had long given up smoking.  Here—­I must confess my weakness, but the illusion was striking—­I commenced to speak to the hallucination.  Advancing as closely as possible—­the body did not retreat as I approached, but remained perfectly motionless—­I said to the ghost: 

“I thank you, father.  You know how your son is suffering, and you have come—­you have come to testify to my innocence.  I thank you, father.  Give me your hand, and with a firm filial hand-clasp I will respond to your unexpected visit.  Don’t you want to?  Let me have your hand.  Give me your hand, or I will call you a liar!”

I stretched out my hand, but of course the hallucination did not deem it worth while to respond, and I was forever deprived of the opportunity of feeling the touch of a ghost.  The cry which I uttered and which so upset my friend, the jailer, creating some confusion in the prison, was called forth by the sudden disappearance of the phantom—­it was so sudden that the space in the place where the corpse had been seemed to me more terrible than the corpse itself.

Such is the power of human imagination when, excited, it creates phantoms and visions, peopling the bottomless and ever silent emptiness with them.  It is sad to admit that there are people, however, who believe in ghosts and build upon this belief nonsensical theories about certain relations between the world of the living and the enigmatic land inhabited by the dead.  I understand that the human ear and eye can be deceived—­but how can the great and lucid human mind fall into such coarse and ridiculous deception?