I sat up, hard pressed against the back of my chair.

"Nay, start not," he said, "I am now as truly flesh and blood as you
are; but a short three weeks ago I was a spirit in the realms of endless
space. I know," he continued, "that my history is a sore thing to
inflict upon any man, and there are few to whom I would have broached
it, but I will make it brief. Three weeks ago these spiritualists held
privately in this town what they call a séance, and at that time I was
impelled, by a power I understood not, to appear among them. After I had
come it was supposed that a mistake had been made, and that I was not
the spirit wanted. In the temporary confusion occasioned by this
supposition, and while the attention of the exhibitors was otherwise
occupied, I was left exposed to the influence of the materializing
agencies for a much longer time than had been intended; so long,
indeed, that instead of remaining in the misty, indistinct form in which
spirits are presented by these men to their patrons, I became as
thoroughly embodied, as full of physical life and energy, and as
complete a mortal man as I was when I disappeared from this earth, one
hundred and two years ago."

"One hundred and two years!" I mechanically ejaculated. There was upon
me the impulse to get up and go where I could breathe the outer air; to
find my wife and talk to her about marketing or some household affair,
to get away from this being--human or whatever he was--but this was
impossible. That interest which dawned upon me when I first perceived my
visitor now held me as if it had been a spell.

"Yes," he said, "I deceased in 1785, being then in my thirtieth year. I
was a citizen of Bixbury, on the Massachusetts coast, but I am not