see these two human creatures together, without feeling their
incompatibility; without having a sense that one must be hostile to the
other. The schoolmaster, through his fine instincts, doubtless had a
sense of this, and sat gazing at the lurid, wrathful figure of the
Doctor, in a sort of trance and fascination: not able to stir;
bewildered by the sight of the great spider and other surroundings; and
this strange, uncouth fiend, who had always been abhorrent to him,--he
had a kind of curiosity in it, waited to see what would come of it, but
felt it to be an unnatural state to him. And again the grim Doctor came
and stood before him, prepared to make another of those strange
utterances with which he had already so perplexed him.

That night--that midnight--it was rumored through the town that one of
the inhabitants, going home late along the street that led by the
graveyard, saw the grim Doctor standing by the open window of the study
behind the elm tree, in his old dressing-gown, chill as was the night,
and flinging his arms abroad wildly into the darkness, and muttering
like the growling of a tempest, with occasional vociferations that grew
even shrill with passion. The listener, though affrighted, could not
resist an impulse to pause, and attempt overhearing something that
might let him into the secret counsels of this strange wild man, whom
the town held in such awe and antipathy; to learn, perhaps, what was
the great spider, and whether he were summoning the dead out of their
graves. However, he could make nothing out of what he overheard, except
it were fragmentary curses, of a dreadful character, which the Doctor
brought up with might and main out of the depths of his soul, and flung
them forth, burning hot, aimed at what, and why, and to what practical
end, it was impossible to say; but as necessarily as a volcano, in a
state of eruption, sends forth boiling lava, sparkling and
scintillating stones, and a sulphurous atmosphere, indicative of its