dishes in the club kitchen, putting away till next day, with the musical
murmur of a smitten glass or the jingle of a dropped spoon. But if I
should try to render his words, I should spoil their impression in the
vain attempt, and I feel that it is best to give the story as best I can
in words of my own, so far from responsive to the requisitions of the
occult incident.

The first intimation Alford had of the strange effect, which from first
to last was rather an obsession than a possession of his, was after a
morning of idle satisfaction spent in watching the target practice from
the fort in the neighborhood of the little fishing-village where he was
spending the summer. The target was two or three miles out in the open
water beyond the harbor, and he found his pleasure in watching the smoke
of the gun for that discrete interval before the report reached him, and
then for that somewhat longer interval before he saw the magnificent
splash of the shot which, as it plunged into the sea, sent a fan-shaped
fountain thirty or forty feet into the air. He did not know and he did
not care whether the target was ever hit or not. That fact was no part
of his concern. His affair was to watch the burst of smoke from the fort
and then to watch the upward gush of water, almost as light and vaporous
to the eye, where the ball struck. He did not miss one of the shots
fired during the forenoon, and when he met the other people who sat down
with him at the midday dinner in the hotel, his talk with them was
naturally of the morning's practice. They one and all declared it a
great nuisance, and said that it had shattered their nerves terribly,
which was not perhaps so strange, since they were all women. But when
they asked him in his quality of nervous wreck whether he had not
suffered from the prolonged and repeated explosions, too, he found
himself able to say no, that he had enjoyed every moment of the firing.
He added that he did not believe he had even noticed the noise after the