by the undoubtedly strange spectacle of Randolph packing his own
clothes. During the afternoon a lad from the village was instructed to
collect his companions for a science lecture the same evening at eight
o'clock. And so the eventful day wore on.

'We arrive now at this hour of eight P.M. on this 10th day of January.
The night is dark and windy; some snow has been falling, but has now
ceased. In an upper room is Randolph engaged in expounding the elements
of dynamics; in the room under that is Hester Dyett--for Hester has
somehow obtained a key that opens the door of Randolph's room, and
takes advantage of his absence upstairs to explore it. Under her is
Lord Pharanx, certainly in bed, probably asleep. Hester, trembling all
over in a fever of fear and excitement, holds a lighted taper in one
hand, which she religiously shades with the other; for the storm is
gusty, and the gusts, tearing through the crevices of the rattling old
casements, toss great flickering shadows on the hangings, which
frighten her to death. She has just time to see that the whole room is
in the wildest confusion, when suddenly a rougher puff blows out the
flame, and she is left in what to her, standing as she was on that
forbidden ground, must have been a horror of darkness. At the same
moment, clear and sharp from right beneath her, a pistol-shot rings out
on her ear. For an instant she stands in stone, incapable of motion.
Then on her dazed senses there supervenes--so she swore--the
consciousness that some object is moving in the room--moving apparently
of its own accord--moving in direct opposition to all the laws of
nature as she knows them. She imagines that she perceives a phantasm--a
strange something--globular-white--looking, as she says, "like a
good-sized ball of cotton"--rise directly from the floor before her,
ascending slowly upward, as if driven aloft by some invisible force. A
sharp shock of the sense of the supernatural deprives her of ordered