there popped out from this hole the green head of a parrot which the
old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, "Cuckoo," in
a thin, squeaking, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the
frightful old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that "Cuckoo!" a cold
perspiration formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared
and then I realized that it was only a dream.

The next evening a tall thin man, clothed in the black dress of a
minister, appeared to me. He did not come near me, but kept close to the
wall and whirled, with body all bent over, rapidly and noiselessly about
the room. His miserable, thin legs and the gown of his dress stood out
stiff and straight as he turned quickly. And--most horrible of all--he
had for a head the skull of a large white bird with a long beak, which
was a monstrous exaggeration of a sea-mew's skull, bleached by the sun
and wind and waves, that I had the previous summer found upon the beach
at the Island. (I believe this old man's visit coincided with the
time when I was worst, almost in danger.) After he had made one or two
revolutions about the room, he quickly and silently began to rise from
the floor. Ever moving his thin legs he reached the cornice, then higher
and higher still he rose, above the pictures and the looking-glasses,
until he was lost to sight in the twilight shadows that lay near the
ceiling.

And for two or three years after this event the faces of those visions
haunted me. On winter evenings I thought of them with a shudder as
I mounted the stairway, which at that period it was not customary to
light. "If they should be there," I would say to myself; "suppose one of
them is lying in wait to pursue me, and stretch out their hands and try
to catch me by the legs."