“To sundry it is given to be drawn away, and to be apart from the body
for a season; for, as concerning rills which would flow across each other
the weaker is borne along by the stronger, so there be certain of kin
whose paths intersecting, their souls do bear company, the while their
bodies go fore-appointed ways, unknowing.”
“She had—she has—a singular taste in reading,” I managed to say,
mastering my agitation.
“Yes. And now perhaps you will have the kindness to explain how you knew
her name and that of the ship she sailed in.”
“You talked of her in your sleep,” I said.
A week later we were towed into the port of New York. But the _Morrow_
was never heard from.
THE MIDDLE TOE OF THE RIGHT FOOT
I
IT is well known that the old Manton house is haunted. In all the rural
district near about, and even in the town of Marshall, a mile away, not
one person of unbiased mind entertains a doubt of it; incredulity is
confined to those opinionated persons who will be called “cranks” as soon
as the useful word shall have penetrated the intellectual demesne of the
Marshall _Advance_. The evidence that the house is haunted is of two
kinds: the testimony of disinterested witnesses who have had ocular
proof, and that of the house itself. The former may be disregarded and
ruled out on any of the various grounds of objection which may be urged
against it by the ingenious; but facts within the observation of all are
material and controlling.
In the first place, the Manton house has been unoccupied by mortals for
more than ten years, and with its outbuildings is slowly falling into
decay—a circumstance which in itself the judicious will hardly venture to
ignore. It stands a little way off the loneliest reach of the Marshall
and Harriston road, in an opening which was once a farm and is still
disfigured with strips of rotting fence and half covered with brambles
overrunning a stony and sterile soil long unacquainted with the plow.
The house itself is in tolerably good condition, though badly
weather-stained and in dire need of attention from the glazier, the
smaller male population of the region having attested in the manner of
its kind its disapproval of dwelling without dwellers. It is two stories
in height, nearly square, its front pierced by a single doorway flanked
on each side by a window boarded up to the very top. Corresponding
windows above, not protected, serve to admit light and rain to the rooms
of the upper floor. Grass and weeds grow pretty rankly all about, and a
few shade trees, somewhat the worse for wind, and leaning all in one
direction, seem to be making a concerted effort to run away. In short,
as the Marshall town humorist explained in the columns of the _Advance_,
“the proposition that the Manton house is badly haunted is the only
logical conclusion from the premises.” The fact that in this dwelling
Mr. Manton thought it expedient one night some ten years ago to rise and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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