"So be it," said the cruel Man of Fancy to himself; "and a good
riddance too."

Together with these shadows, and from the same region, there came an
uninvited multitude of shapes which at any time during his life had
tormented the Man of Fancy in his moods of morbid melancholy or had
haunted him in the delirium of fever. The walls of his castle in
the air were not dense enough to keep them out, nor would the
strongest of earthly architecture have availed to their exclusion.
Here were those forms of dim terror which had beset him at the
entrance of life, waging warfare with his hopes; here were strange
uglinesses of earlier date, such as haunt children in the night-
time. He was particularly startled by the vision of a deformed old
black woman whom he imagined as lurking in the garret of his native
home, and who, when he was an infant, had once come to his bedside
and grinned at him in the crisis of a scarlet fever. This same
black shadow, with others almost as hideous, now glided among the
pillars of the magnificent saloon, grinning recognition, until the
man shuddered anew at the forgotten terrors of his childhood. It
amused him, however, to observe the black woman, with the
mischievous caprice peculiar to such beings, steal up to the chair
of the Oldest Inhabitant and peep into his half-dreamy mind.

"Never within my memory," muttered that venerable personage, aghast,
"did I see such a face."

Almost immediately after the unrealities just described, arrived a
number of guests whom incredulous readers may be inclined to rank
equally among creatures of imagination. The most noteworthy were an
incorruptible Patriot; a Scholar without pedantry; a Priest without