"In a moment--more swiftly than I can tell you--I pushed past the man, threw open the door, and just managed, by a violent effort, to drag my friend on to the landing. Then the lift rose with a sudden impulse, fell again, and rushed, with frightful velocity, to the basement of the hotel, whence we heard an appalling crash, followed by groans. We rushed downstairs, and the horrible spectacle of destruction that met our eyes I shall never forget. The unhappy porter was expiring in agony; but the warning had saved my life and my friend's." "_I was that friend_," said I--the collector of these anecdotes; "and so far I can testify to the truth of Jones's story." At this moment, however, the gong for dressing sounded, and we went to our several apartments, after this emotional specimen of "Evenings at Home." IN CASTLE PERILOUS. "What we suffer from most," said the spectre, when I had partly recovered from my fright, "is a kind of aphasia." The spectre was sitting on the armchair beside my bed in the haunted room of Castle Perilous. "I don't know," said I, as distinctly as the chattering of my teeth would permit, "that I quite follow you. Would you mind--excuse me--handing me that flask which lies on the table near you. . . . Thanks." The spectre, without stirring, so arranged the a priori sensuous schemata of time and space {261} that the silver flask, which had been well out of my reach, was in my hand. I poured half the contents into a cup and offered it to him. "No spirits," he said curtly. I swallowed eagerly the heady liquor, and felt a little more like myself. "You were complaining," I remarked, "of something like aphasia?" "I was," he replied. "You know what aphasia is in the human subject? A paralysis of certain nervous centres, which prevents the patient, though perfectly sane, from getting at the words which he intends to use, and forces others upon him. He may wish to observe that it is a fine morning, and may discover that his idea has taken the form of an observation about the Roman Calendar under the Emperor Justinian. That is aphasia, and we suffer from what, I presume, is a spiritual modification of that disorder." "Yet to-night," I responded, "you are speaking like a printed book." "To-night," said the spectre, acknowledging the compliment with a bow, "the conditions are peculiarly favourable." "Not to _me_," I thought, with a sigh. "And I am able to manifest myself with unusual clearness." "Then you are not always in such form as I am privileged to find you in?" I inquired. "By no means," replied the spectre. "Sometimes I cannot appear worth a cent. Often I am invisible to the naked eye, and even quite indiscernible by any of the senses. Sometimes I can only rap on the table, or send a cold wind over a visitor's face, or at most pull off his bedclothes (like the spirit which appeared to Caligula, and is mentioned by Suetonius) and utter hollow groans."