was physically none the worse for my fall, and I resumed my way
immediately.

"But the path was singularly difficult to find, or rather the path I
was following did not seem to be the right one. I did not recognize it;
I could have sworn (except I knew the contrary) that I had never seen
it before. The moon had risen, though her light was as yet obscured by
clouds, but neither my immediate surroundings nor the general aspect of
the region appeared familiar. Dark, silent hill-sides mounted up on
either hand, and the road, for the most part, plunged downward, as if
to conduct me into the bowels of the earth. The place was alive with
strange echoes, so that at times I seemed to be walking through the
midst of muttering voices and mysterious whispers, and a wild, faint
sound of laughter seemed ever and anon to reverberate among the passes
of the hills. Currents of colder air sighing up through narrow defiles
and dark crevices touched my face as with airy fingers. A certain
feeling of anxiety and insecurity began to take possession of me,
though there was no definable cause for it, unless that I might be
belated in getting home. With the perverse instinct of those who are
lost I hastened my steps, but was impelled now and then to glance back
over my shoulder, with a sensation of being pursued. But no living
creature was in sight. The moon, however, had now risen higher, and the
clouds that were drifting slowly across the sky flung into the naked
valley dusky shadows, which occasionally assumed shapes that looked
like the vague semblance of gigantic human forms.

"How long I had been hurrying onward I know not, when, with a kind of
suddenness, I found myself approaching a graveyard. It was situated on
the spur of a hill, and there was no fence around it, nor anything to
protect it from the incursions of passers-by. There was something in