Soon Mrs. Mason heard the well-known tread; She heard the key slow creaking in the door, Spied, through the gloom obscure, towards the bed Nick creeping soft, as oft he had crept before; When, bang, she threw a something at his head, And Nick at once lay prostrate on the floor; While she exclaim'd with her indignant face on,-- "How dare you use your wife so, Mr. Mason?" Spare we to tell how fiercely she debated, Especially the length of her oration,-- Spare we to tell how Nick expostulated, Roused by the bump into a good set passion, So great, that more than once he execrated, Ere he crawl'd into bed in his usual fashion; --The Muses hate brawls; suffice it then to say, He duck'd below the clothes--and there he lay! 'Twas now the very witching time of night, When churchyards groan, and graves give up their dead, And many a mischievous, enfranchised Sprite Had long since burst his bonds of stone or lead, And hurried off, with schoolboy-like delight, To play his pranks near some poor wretch's bed, Sleeping perhaps serenely as a porpoise, Nor dreaming of this fiendish Habeas Corpus. Not so our Nicholas, his meditations Still to the same tremendous theme recurred, The same dread subject of the dark narrations, Which, back'd with such authority, he'd heard; Lost in his own horrific contemplations, He ponder'd o'er each well-remember'd word; When at the bed's foot, close beside the post, He verily believed he saw--a Ghost! Plain and more plain the unsubstantial Sprite To his astonish'd gaze each moment grew; Ghastly and gaunt, it rear'd its shadowy height, Of more than mortal seeming to the view, And round its long, thin, bony fingers drew A tatter'd winding-sheet, of course _all white_;-- The moon that moment peeping through a cloud, Nick very plainly saw it _through the shroud_! And now those matted locks, which never yet Had yielded to the comb's unkind divorce, Their long-contracted amity forget, And spring asunder with elastic force; Nay, e'en the very cap, of texture coarse, Whose ruby cincture crown'd that brow of jet, Uprose in agony--the Gorgon's head Was but a type of Nick's up-squatting in the bed. From every pore distill'd a clammy dew, Quaked every limb,--the candle too no doubt, _En règle_, _would_ have burnt extremely blue, But Nick unluckily had put it out; And he, though naturally bold and stout, In short, was in a most tremendous stew;-- The room was fill'd with a sulphureous smell, But where that came from Mason could not tell.