made a beginning at resistance and was encouraged. He said:

"I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are not
malignant traveling this accursed road. I shall leave them a record
and an appeal. I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions that I
endure--I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!"
Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent: in his dream.

Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook, one-half of
which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without a
pencil. He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of blood
and wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched the paper with the point of
his twig when a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measureless
distance away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever
nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the
loon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated
in an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow
gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn
over the verge of the world whence it had come. But the man felt
that this was not so--that it was near by and had not moved.

A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and
his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses was
affected; he felt it rather as a consciousness--a mysterious mental
assurance of some overpowering presence--some supernatural
malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that
swarmed about him, and superior to them in power. He knew that it
had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching
him; from what direction he did not know--dared not conjecture. All
his former fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that