The former mistress of the house had been a very remarkable woman whom I had known intimately. She was brilliantly clever and accomplished, and charming to talk to, but unfortunately she took a vivid interest in occultism of the wrong sort--in Black Magic. Anything to do with spells, witchcraft, elementals, incantations, attracted her enormously, and she had a very considerable knowledge of the subject. I have no doubt she could have worked a great deal of mischief had she been so inclined, but luckily her designs were more impish than malign. I often warned her that there was undoubted danger in such researches, and that she was certain to attract about her elementals of a most undesirable kind, but my warnings went unheeded, and to the time of her death her interest in the dark subject never flagged. She had not died in the house I had come to stay in, but it occurred to me as I dressed for dinner that I was in her old bedroom. This suggestion came to me suddenly, and to the accompaniment of a sound. A sound more felt than heard, a sound known to the spirit rather than to the ear; a tiptoe silence hovering on the brink of sound's threshold. My surroundings gave a very pleasant impression. A glorious sunset was flooding the west. My room was full of golden light, and the window was flung wide to the warm summer air. There was nothing to be recorded either ghostly or uncanny, yet something was present which made me uncomfortable. Strange thoughts, bizarre fancies, found lodgment in my mind, and I stood rigid, listening intently. The room was full of secrets. They seemed suddenly to creep forth and whisper together. There it was again! that soft echo of a sound which was like no other sound. An eerie, uncanny sensation crept down my spine, a strange, undefinable feeling of uncertainty, not yet amounting to fear. I moved towards the corner of the room, whence the sound proceeded, and as I approached, out of that corner dropped down a huge gray moth, a second dropped down after it, and both lay with outstretched wings on the white coverlet of the bed. Now I have always had a peculiar antipathy to moths, the big furry sort. I can handle a spider, and bear with a black beetle, but with big woolly moths I cannot live happily. I saw one once under a microscope, and it was covered with horrid looking parasites. I am aware that other creatures are similarly afflicted, but this microscopic vision accentuated my horror of all big moths. They seem to me repulsive, sinister, and uncanny creatures. The curious thing is that though I dislike them they adore me, and I always know that if there is one in my parish it will find me out.