If I felt frightened at this strange recital in the gloom of our wayside hut, lit fitfully as it was by the red leaping flames of the fire, which threw distorted shadows on the walls which a boy's imagination might work into terrible fantasies--if I felt frightened it was with a pleasing fear; for I delighted to feel the stirring of unseen things about me, when safe in the comforting security of my father's presence. I remember glancing cautiously around me into the shadowy corners, half hoping to see some white and horrible face gazing out at me; and I strained my ears to catch some echo of the cryings and moanings which my father had been speaking of. The wind had quite dropped, and the night was perfectly still, with a sort of waiting uneasy stillness; and I thought I could hear a movement in the darkness outside. But my father was continuing: "And when he lit his lamp the blackness through the window was full of beckoning hands, and when he blew the lamp out for very fear the room was alive with creeping feet. And sometimes he felt cold fingers on his neck, and sometimes breath in his hair, and sometimes...."

At this moment there was a tapping at the window.

My father looked round sharply, and the words died on his lips. He clutched my arm with a hard grip, and I knew my part was to be perfectly still. And then suddenly he let out a bitter cry, and under cover of it had pushed me behind my cloak and through the hole in the wall. The cloak followed, and he hung his own coat in its place; and a moment later the knapsack was bundled after me. I crouched motionless in the cold, with my cloak pulled about my shoulders; and still my father was crooning in a kind of unearthly sob, broken now and again by short little dry chucklings. I summoned courage to widen with my fingers a slit in his coat through which I could peep into the hut. I caught one glimpse of my father's face in the firelight; again it was drawn with haggard madness, but I thought the cunning in the eye was sharper than before. He was sitting in front of the fire with his knees huddled up to his chin, peering slantwise behind him towards the door. I looked towards the door; the barrier was down.

Again there was a tapping at the window. The sound came to me from the outside. And then I heard a low wail, "For the mercy of heaven, let me in, let me in." My father moaned in reply, hugging himself convulsively, and finishing on a shriek that broke into a hideous laughter.

All this was a new game on me, and curiosity rather than fear was the uppermost feeling in my mind. Indeed, the most frightening thing was the stillness of the woodland behind me. It seemed as though a great hand had the world in its grip, and a loosening of the fingers would set the air into sudden and startling motion.

I heard a shuffling at the other side of the hut, and the wall shook as though a body had fallen against it. I looked through the slit in the coat; the door was slowly opening.