“People who observe things as they plod their way through the world, and who have at all made the human soul a study, have often been made aware that there is a certain nameless something that comes over a man, that with resistless eloquence persuades his inner soul that some danger approaches, some peril besets, some disaster impends over him. There are times, when calm reigns all around him, and peace blossoms in his heart, that he suddenly is apprised that Calamity is flapping her way toward him through the terrible nebulous gloom of the Future. Many a man and woman has felt this; and some such feeling, some such horror-form, now seemed hovering, cowering, crawling near me, and preparing to seize upon and fang my very soul, in the presence of the queer little man at my side. It was a mixed feeling of guilt and dread, and yet no guilt was mine. I had not cheated, robbed, lied, to my best friend. I had not fared sumptuously every day on the proceeds of villainy; _my_ wife and daughters did not dress in purple and fine linen, bought with the money wronged from a poor man, or any man at all. I had not a fine piano, and parlors full of guests enjoying funds thus gotten; nor had I driven fast and fine horses of my own, fed and fattened on the money of a man whose child was at that very moment struggling, gasping, choking in the clutches of grim death for want of bread and medicine. True, there were those who did all this--and the corpse of a pretty little girl attests it--but I did not; why then should I be afraid? There is no answer to that, and yet I was in dread. “After saying ‘Very!’ I spoke no more, but striving to repress the horror creeping over me, I tried to look as indignant as possible, which he was not slow to observe; for he approached, slapped me familiarly on the back, poured out and drank a cup of tea and ate a rusk, which settled the question as to his being no ghost; then he dropped carelessly into my easy-chair, rubbed his little perked-up nose with his thin, little, bluish-pale fingers, and throwing himself forward, so as to look right up into my face, he laughed heartily, and then bawled out, rather than sung, at the top of his voice: “‘The storm howls drearily, Let you and I live cheerily; And we’ll study things that never were known. I’ve come from the West, To see the man that I like best. Don’t think I’m all depravity-- _I’m_ in search of the centre of gravity-- And _you’ll_ find out the Philosophers’ Stone.’ And then he again burst out into one of the wildest, most _outré_, and ridiculous laughs that ever fell on mortal hearing. “The wretched doggerel that I had just heard was beneath my notice; and little did I know of the singer, and still less did I imagine that those lines were to me the most important I had ever heard.