the garbage lay thickest, rubbed itself caressingly on the gory floors of slaughter-houses, and finally entered a dark, empty house in a road that, if not the Euston Road, was a road in every way resembling it. The atmosphere of the place was so suggestive of murder that my soul sickened within me; and so much so, in fact, that when I saw several grisly forms gliding down the gloomy staircases and along the sombre, narrow passages, where X----'s immaterial personality was halting, apparently to greet it, I could look no longer, but shut my eyes. For some seconds I kept them closed, and, on re-opening them, found the tableau had changed--the material body before the fire was re-animated, and in the depths of the bleared, protruding eyes I saw the creeping, crawling, waddling, enigmatical shadow vibrating with murder. Again the scene changed, and I saw the physical man standing in the middle of a bedroom, listening--listening with blanched face and slightly open mouth, a steely glimmer of the superphysical, of the malignant, devilish superphysical, in his dilated pupils. What he is anticipating I cannot say, I dare not think--unless--unless the repetition of a scream; and it comes--I cannot hear it, but I can feel it, feel the reverberation through the crime-kissed walls and vicious, tainted atmosphere. Something is at the door--it presses against it; I can catch a glimpse of its head, its face; my blood freezes--it is horrible. It enters the room, grey and silent--it lays one hand on the man's sleeve and drags him forward. He ascends to the room above, and, with all the brutality of those accustomed to the dead and dying, drags the---- But I will not go on. The grey unknown, the occult something, sternly issues its directions, and the merely physical obeys them. It is all over; the plot of the vice elementals has triumphed, and as they gleefully step away, one by one, patting their material comrade on the shoulder, the darkness, the hellish darkness of that infamous night lightens, and in through the windows steal the cold grey beams of early morning. I am assured; I have had enough; I pitch the photograph into the grate. The evening comes--the evening after the execution. A feeling of the greatest, the most unenviable curiosity urges me to go, to see if what I surmise, will actually happen. I leave Gipsy Hill by an early afternoon train, I spend a few hours at a literary club, I dine at a quiet--an eminently quiet--restaurant in Oxford Street, and at eleven o'clock I am standing near a spot which I believe--I have no positive proof--I merely believe, was frequented by X----. It is more than twelve hours since he was executed; will anything--will the shape, the personality, I anticipate--come? The night air grows colder; I shrink deeper and deeper into the folds of my overcoat, and wish--devoutly wish--myself back again by my fireside.