“We now found ourselves in a valley of stygian darkness, and of such restricted dimensions that the spray from the river bathed me from head to foot. My companion pressed resolutely on, and, maintaining the same extraordinary and uncanny silence, conducted me to a recess in the hillside where the outlines of a bare, dismantled house gradually arose to greet us. It was merely a pile of ruins, old, yet naked, without any of those evidences of vegetation one usually associates with the antique. I particularly noticed this deficiency; it impressed and perplexed me. If moss and lichens grew elsewhere--why not here? “The situation of the house was strikingly romantic and weird--indeed, one could not well imagine a more dismal spot. A giant mass of black rock reared itself in the background like a Brobdingnagian bat. In the foreground, and at so close a distance that the spray blowing madly over my face and clothes drenched me to the skin, rushed a seething mass of sable water, whilst to accentuate all this Avernian horror, the wind whistled demoniacally, and the rain fell with ever-increasing fury. Turning to my guide, I impatiently requested him ‘to move on,’ and take me with the greatest expedition to the nearest available hostelry. “In reply he took off his hat, and, thrusting his monstrous head forward, revealed to my horror-stricken gaze a shapeless, sodden mass of black flesh! “The cause of his silence was now obvious--he couldn’t speak because he had no mouth; but neither had he eyes, ears, or nose; nothing but that awful, unmeaning, rotund protuberance. “I stood aghast, too terrified to stir, almost too terrified to breathe, with the hideous Thing looming there before me, and the booming of the river behind. It was a ghastly situation. “The creature advanced an inch--my blood turned to ice; it raised its arms--my soul sickened within me; it lunged suddenly forward--and--fell right through me. As it did so I heard a fiendish chuckle, which, dying slowly out, gave way to a succession of blood-curdling groans that seemed to proceed from the interior of the ruins. The figure, however, was nowhere to be seen; it must have dematerialised on the spot. “Very much relieved at this, though still considerably frightened, I was now able to use my limbs, and turning my back on the ghostly building, I felt my way along the bank of the river. I dare not glance at the boiling foam, the very sound of it made my flesh creep; nor did I feel in any degree safe till a winding of the footpath brought me to a bridge, on the opposite side of which I saw the twinkling lights of many houses. I was now, once again, in the land of the living, and a substantial meal by a cosy fire helped, in a good measure, to dissipate my fears and recompense me for all the trials I had undergone.