But it is with this young man’s feelings we have to do. In spite of the investigator’s unpleasant surroundings, his thoughts were those of happy anticipation, and his mood that of extreme satisfaction. All unmindful of the misery on every side, he paced up and down the little cell, in which the faint light from the corridor chased shadows on the stone floor and dim walls. His face bore a look of triumph. He congratulated himself. What to him were the disturbances that assaulted his senses, the noises of those who amused themselves according to their possibilities, or the snoring of some who dully slept, luxuriating in the comforts of the best home they had ever known, the vomiting of a drunken sailor across the tier, an obscene song from a young negro with a falsetto voice heard along the corridor, or the clog dancing of an “artist” directly over his head, who whistled his own accompaniment. These things were nothing. He scarcely heard the shriek of the delirium tremens case in the hospital ward below, nor the curses of the person constrained in the straight-jacket. The remarks of the poor devil occupying the “cooler” were naught. The smell of iodoform was lost to him, for all this had nothing to do with his experiment. Had you seen the books on theosophy, occult science, reports of psychological societies, etc., in his beautiful apartments uptown, you would perhaps have guessed his object. But only he could have told you properly of his enthusiastic devotion, his absorbing interest in these studies, and, most of all, of his disappointing attempts at personal research. For in spite of closest study, deepest investigations, and widest experimenting, his longing and anxiety to see an apparition had never been satisfied. Such things as ghosts existed, he was sure of that—he knew it. Others had seen them. But his ardent longing to have personal demonstration of their presence remained unsatisfied, despite the many séances attended, desperate colds contracted in churchyards, and heroic pilgrimages to alleged mahatmas. Oh, the bitterness of hearing and rehearing the success of others whose accounts he even found himself jealous enough to doubt! But at last it had come—this inspiration. Did the doctrine of environment mean anything at all? Assuredly! Here was the key to the situation, and that is why arrangements had been effected by him to sleep alone in the cell, the very bed, and bedclothes of a man hanged that afternoon. That is why he awaited midnight in the Tombs—midnight in “Murderers’ Row.”