“It doesn’t teach me all I want to know about ghosts.” Surprise was something Dr. Lloyd was never known to express or imply. He sat looking at the visitor with his calm professional eye, as if it were the most habitual thing in the world for sane lawyers to come into his office at night, wanting to know about ghosts. “I want to know all about absurd illusions,—in people of undoubted sanity.” “Subject of some scope,” dryly remarked the doctor. “I want to know all that _you_ know about hallucinations, visions. I want an elaborate exposition of the visual apparatus as connected with the brain, and of the derangement of its nervous functions.” “Upon my word, you’re a pretty fellow!” “And then I want you to lend me _all_ your books.” And once more he gazed around on the coveted treasures of the shelves. One of the great logs had burned in two, the chunks falling forward upon the other blazing sticks. The doctor had made a move toward the tongs, but the lawyer arose, and with a sort of cumbrous agility kicked first one and then the other into the space between the dogs. Dr. Lloyd watched this proceeding with silent disapproval. Far be it from him to put his dapper old-fashioned foot-gear to any such purpose. The warmth of the fire was grateful, for it had grown much colder without. The wind surged down the street like the passing of many feet, some tumultuous human rush. The fir-tree beside the door was filled with voices, sibilant whisperings, sighs. Clouds were scudding through the sky; Kenbigh could see them from where he sat listening to the doctor’s monologue. The moonlight lay on the old-fashioned garden without, all pillaged by the autumn winds,—the rose-bushes but leafless wands; the arbors, naked trellises; the walks, laid off with rectangular precision, showing what the symmetry of its summer guise had been, as a skeleton might suggest the perfection of the human form. The lights in the two-story frame house beyond—for the doctor’s office was in the yard of his dwelling and the garden lay a little to the rear—were extinguished one by one. A dog close by barked for a time, with echoes from the hills and depressions, and then fell to howling mournfully. The doctor talked on, now and then taking down the books to illustrate; marking the passages with a neat strip of paper in lieu of turning down a leaf, as Kenbigh seemed disposed to do. He piled the volumes beside his apt pupil on the candle-stand, and as the lawyer fell to at them he himself read for a time, as a light recreation, from a history in some twelve volumes. To a country gentleman of ample leisure and bookish habit, this lengthy work was but as a mouthful. Dr. Lloyd rose at last, knocked the ashes out of his pipe upon the head of one of the fire-dogs, glanced at the absorbed lawyer, and remarked, “You’ll come over to my house to go to bed after a little more, won’t you?” “Reckon so,” responded Kenbigh, without lifting his head.