THE FIRST PHANTOM.


Don't tell me that it wasn't a knocker. I had seen it often
enough, and I ought to know. So ought the three-o'clock beer, in
dirty high-lows, swinging himself over the railing, or executing a
demoniacal jig upon the doorstep; so ought the butcher, although
butchers as a general thing are scornful of such trifles; so ought
the postman, to whom knockers of the most extravagant description
were merely human weaknesses, that were to be pitied and used. And
so ought, for the matter of that, etc., etc., etc.

But then it was SUCH a knocker. A wild, extravagant, and utterly
incomprehensible knocker. A knocker so mysterious and suspicious
that Policeman X 37, first coming upon it, felt inclined to take it
instantly in custody, but compromised with his professional
instincts by sharply and sternly noting it with an eye that
admitted of no nonsense, but confidently expected to detect its
secret yet. An ugly knocker; a knocker with a hard, human face,
that was a type of the harder human face within. A human face that
held between its teeth a brazen rod. So hereafter, in the
mysterious future should be held, etc., etc.

But if the knocker had a fierce human aspect in the glare of day,
you should have seen it at night, when it peered out of the
gathering shadows and suggested an ambushed figure; when the light
of the street lamps fell upon it, and wrought a play of sinister
expression in its hard outlines; when it seemed to wink meaningly
at a shrouded figure who, as the night fell darkly, crept up the