I have mistaken for a mirror the glass that protected a wonderful
picture?

I saw before me a wild country, broken and heathy. Desolate hills
of no great height, but somehow of strange appearance, occupied
the middle distance; along the horizon stretched the tops of a
far-off mountain range; nearest me lay a tract of moorland, flat
and melancholy.

Being short-sighted, I stepped closer to examine the texture of a
stone in the immediate foreground, and in the act espied, hopping
toward me with solemnity, a large and ancient raven, whose purply
black was here and there softened with gray. He seemed looking for
worms as he came. Nowise astonished at the appearance of a live
creature in a picture, I took another step forward to see him
better, stumbled over something--doubtless the frame of the mirror--
and stood nose to beak with the bird: I was in the open air, on a
houseless heath!




CHAPTER III

THE RAVEN

I turned and looked behind me: all was vague and uncertain, as when
one cannot distinguish between fog and field, between cloud and
mountain-side. One fact only was plain--that I saw nothing I knew.
Imagining myself involved in a visual illusion, and that touch would