Shortly before midnight, I awoke from a heavy dream, to encounter a ghost-trick much too ghostly for my fancy. My brother-in-law, who manufactured it, deserves for such vapid cookery to be named before you without reserve, as the maltmaster of this washy brewage. Had suspicion been more compatible with intrepidity, I might perhaps, by his moral maxim about this matter, on the road, as well as by his taking up the side-room, at the middle door of which stood my couch, have easily divined the whole. But now, on awakening, I felt myself blown upon by a cold ghost-breath, which I could nowise deduce from the distant bolted window; a point I had rightly decided, for the Dragoon was producing the phenomenon through the key-hole by a pair of bellows. Every sort of coldness in the night-season reminds you of clay-coldness and spectre-coldness. I summoned my resolution, however, and abode the issue; but now the very coverlid began to get in motion; I pulled it towards me; it would not stay; sharply I sit upright in my bed, and cry, "What is that?" No answer; everywhere silence in the Inn; the whole room full of moonshine. And now my drawing-plaster, my coverlid, actually rose up, and let in the air; at which I felt like a wounded man whose cataplasm you suddenly pull off. In this crisis, I made a bold leap from this Devil's-torus, and leaping, snapped asunder my somnambulist tether. "Where is the silly human fool," cried I, "that dares to ape the unseen sublime him?" But on, above, under the bed, there was nothing to be heard or seen, I looked out of the window; everywhere spectral moonlight and street-stillness; nothing moving except (probably from the wind), on the distant Gallows-hill, a person lately hanged. ------------------------ 15. After the manner of the fine polished English folding-knives, there are now also folding-war-swords, or, in other words--Treaties of Peace. ------------------------ Any man would have taken it for self-deception as well as I; therefore I again wrapped myself in my passive _lit de justice_ and air-bed, and waited with calmness to see whether my fright would subside or not.