into play; there were even moments when passages of his occasional
experience as a sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of
moor and mountain and desert, revived for him--and to the increase of his
keenness--by the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at
moments--once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf or in
some recess--stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing himself behind
a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old the vantage of rock
and tree; he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of
the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone.

He wasn't afraid (though putting himself the question as he believed
gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or in close quarters with the great bear
of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it); and this
indeed--since here at least he might be frank!--because of the
impression, so intimate and so strange, that he himself produced as yet a
dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond the liveliest he was likely to
feel. They fell for him into categories, they fairly became familiar,
the signs, for his own perception, of the alarm his presence and his
vigilance created; though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on
his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a
consciousness, unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and
last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so
turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an
incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite dared
to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that side of his
privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary
degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of
corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of
uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere
shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective;