cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter of the windows followed; it was
a bat, he fancied, that had given him this chilly sepulchral caress.
He could yet dimly see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by
the vague light in the west; then all these inanimate objects were
blotted out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour of death had
suddenly come. Thenceforward, for a while, he lost consciousness of
the things about him; he was either buried in deep meditation or sleep
overcame him, brought on by weariness or by the stress of those many
thoughts that lacerated his heart.

Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by name; it was
like some feverish nightmare, when at a step the dreamer falls
headlong over into an abyss, and he trembled. He closed his eyes,
dazzled by bright rays from a red circle of light that shone out from
the shadows. In the midst of the circle stood a little old man who
turned the light of the lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter,
nor move, nor speak. There was something magical about the apparition.
The boldest man, awakened in such a sort, would have felt alarmed at
the sight of this figure, which might have issued from some
sarcophagus hard by.

A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the spectre forbade
the idea of anything supernatural; but for all that, in the brief
space between his dreaming and waking life, the young man's judgment
remained philosophically suspended, as Descartes advises. He was, in
spite of himself, under the influence of an unaccountable
hallucination, a mystery that our pride rejects, and that our
imperfect science vainly tries to resolve.

Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black velvet gown