year, and at a certain hour of the night, if you go and look at that
doorstep you will see the mark wet with fresh blood. Some have pretended
to say that this appearance of blood was but dew; but can dew redden a
cambric handkerchief? Will it crimson the fingertips when you touch it?
And that is what the bloody footstep will surely do when the appointed
night and hour come round, this very year, just as it would three hundred
years ago.

"Well; but how did it come there? I know not precisely in what age it was,
but long ago, when light was beginning to shine into what were called the
dark ages, there was a lord of ---- Hall who applied himself deeply to
knowledge and science, under the guidance of the wisest man of that
age,--a man so wise that he was thought to be a wizard; and, indeed, he
may have been one, if to be a wizard consists in having command over
secret powers of nature, that other men do not even suspect the existence
of, and the control of which enables one to do feats that seem as
wonderful as raising the dead. It is needless to tell you all the strange
stories that have survived to this day about the old Hall; and how it is
believed that the master of it, owing to his ancient science, has still a
sort of residence there, and control of the place; and how, in one of the
chambers, there is still his antique table, and his chair, and some rude
old instruments and machinery, and a book, and everything in readiness,
just as if he might still come back to finish some experiment. What it is
important to say is, that one of the chief things to which the old lord
applied himself was to discover the means of prolonging his own life, so
that its duration should be indefinite, if not infinite; and such was his
science, that he was believed to have attained this magnificent and awful
purpose.

"So, as you may suppose, the man of science had great joy in having done