But as he turned up School street on the left hand side, the solemn and funereal clang from the Old South steeple startled him from his lethargy, striking with gloomy clangor the hour of two. He stopped, listening to the sombre and heavy blare of the great bell as it tolled the hour, and then died away in ghostly and aërial reverberations. Hearkening till the last faint dinning of the swarming tones seemed to fail into soundless vibratory waves, he waited till these too failed, and the awful silence of the night again descended brooding on the air. Two. The hour when spirits, as some wild seer avers, have power to enter from without, and walk the earth till dawn. Looking up, as the fancy crossed his mind, he saw the street, a lonely vista darkling in blue and melancholy gloom, so strangely litten, so unearthly in its whole appearance, that a sudden and silent diffusion of awe spread softly through his being, and held him still. Had he been brought there blindfolded, and the bandage removed, he would scarcely have known where he was, so changed was the street from its familiar aspect. The gibbous moon, a huge, misshapen mass of watery light hanging low in the dead, dark blue, poured a flood of wan, metallic brilliance down one side of the vista, bringing out its architectural features in vivid lustre and ebon blackness, while the structures on the side on which he stood, loomed dark and sharp in deep shadow. So lone, so ghast, so supernaturally still, so changed in the weird and frigid glitter, so desolate and splendid in the melancholy light, the haggard darkness, the mournful and marble silence, that the gazer might have dreamed he stood in the demon-city of the Hebrew story, where foot of man hath seldom trod, and the evil night broods eternal. Tranced with wondering awe, he moved slowly up the pavement, gazing upon the solemn palaces of ebony and silver, with his imagination darkly stirred. Beyond him lay a garden space, breaking the line of the vista, with two chestnut-trees in front on the pavement, whose thick cones of foliage seemed sculptured in metal, and were dimly silvered by the moon. Further on rose the square belfry and high-windowed wall of the Stone Chapel, with its flank gleaming, and its panes glittering in the wan lustre. As his glance rested on this, he saw a gaunt and spectral figure emerge from a shadowed angle, and move slowly, with a strange, uncertain motion, along the base of the chapel wall, with the unearthly light upon its shapeless outlines, and its long, black shadow distinct upon the gleaming pavement. Now creeping on, now halting and appearing to waver, strange in movement, strange and alien in form, it intensified the ghastly and desolate solitude with its presence, and seemed like some lone vagrant fiend slinking abroad from his lair, in the pallor of the waning moon.