At last I began to move, treading softly, and stopping at intervals to watch and listen. I had scarcely proceeded in this way a dozen paces, when I felt as plainly as if I saw the object in the broad glare of the sun, a quick motion at my side in a nook or crevice of the wall. It was like the effort of a person to shrink down and escape from me. In an excess of fright and desperation I clutched at it with my hands, and caught it--I say caught it, for a substance resembling a thick silk filled the palms of both my hands. I held it with the grasp of one who was struggling for life, and tried to speak, but my tongue was dry; and I could not articulate a word: and while I held it, I was conscious that the object was moving away--it moved away, and still I thought I held it. I had not the power to loosen my fingers, which I had a strong impulse to do--and then the silk glided out of them, although they were coiled in it--and the next moment a grasp of muscles, cold and sharp, was on my neck, and pressed into my flesh. I was distraught with terror, and my senses forsook me. When I recovered, I found myself lying on a couch in the great room, my mother sitting at a distance, and an ancient female servant watching over me. This woman was the oldest domestic in the house. She had lived all her life in the family, and had seen two generations into the grave. It was from her lips I had learned most of the traditions that filled my head with such alarm and curiosity; it was from her I had acquired a knowledge of those subterranean passages in which I had encountered this singular adventure; and as soon as my mother left the room I related the whole story to her. She heard it to the end with a dark expression of anger on her face, which I interpreted into a reproof on my willfulness and folly in venturing into such places; and then she questioned me severely as to what I heard and saw, and what I thought it could have been. Finding that I could give her no satisfactory answers to these questions, she enjoined me to hold my tongue about it, and above all things not to speak of it to my mother. She rated me soundly for saying that I firmly believed I had caught something like a woman's dress in my hands; and she made me feel her old stuff gown, that I might assure myself it was no such texture as that. "How could I be so silly as to suppose that a woman, or even a man, would hide in vaults and passages that had not been opened for hundreds of years? What could I imagine they were doing there? It was more likely that rats, and toads, and bats were to be found there than human beings." And a great deal more to the like effect, as if she wanted to impress upon me that it was altogether the fancy of a distempered brain, and no reality.