I shan't trouble you about my train of thoughts or fancies; but I began to feel very like a gentleman in a ghost story, watching experimentally in a haunted chamber. My cigar case was a resource. I was not a bit afraid of being found out. I did not even take the precaution of smoking up the chimney. I boldly lighted my cheroot. I peeped through the dense window curtain there were no shutters. A cold, bright moon was shining with clear sharp lights and shadows. Everything looked strangely cold and motionless outside. The sombre old trees, like gigantic hearse plumes, black and awful. The chapel lay full in view, where so many of the, strange and equivocal race, under whose ancient roof-tree I then stood, were lying under their tombstones. Somehow, I had grown nervous. A little bit of plaster tumbled down the chimney, and startled me confoundedly. Then some time after, I fancied I heard a creaking step on the lobby outside, and, candle in hand, opened the door, and looked out with an odd sort of expectation, and a rather agreeable disappointment, upon vacancy. CHAPTER XII. IN WHICH UNCLE LORNE TROUBLES ME. I was growing most uncomfortably like one of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe's heroes--a nervous race of demigods. I walked like a sentinel up and down my chamber, puffing leisurely the solemn incense, and trying to think of the Opera and my essay on 'Paradise Lost,' and other pleasant subjects. But it would not do. Every now and then, as I turned towards the door, I fancied I saw it softly close. I can't the least say whether it was altogether fancy. It was with the corner, or as the Italians have it, the 'tail' of my eye that I saw, or imagined that I saw, this trifling but unpleasant movement. I called out once or twice sharply--'Come in!' 'Who's there?' 'Who's that?' and so forth, without any sort of effect, except that unpleasant reaction upon the nerves which follows the sound of one's own voice in a solitude of this kind. The fact is I did not myself believe in that stealthy motion of my door, and set it down to one of those illusions which I have sometimes succeeded in analysing--a half-seen combination of objects which, rightly placed in the due relations of perspective, have no mutual connection whatever. So I ceased to challenge the unearthly inquisitor, and allowed him, after a while, serenely enough, to peep as I turned my back, or to withdraw again as I made my regular right-about face. I had now got half-way in my second cheroot, and the clock clanged 'one.' It was a very still night, and the prolonged boom vibrated strangely in my excited ears and brain. I had never been quite such an ass before; but I do assure you I was now in an extremely unpleasant state. One o'clock was better, however, than twelve. Although, by Jove! the bell was 'beating one,' as I remember, precisely as that king of ghosts, old Hamlet, revisited the glimpses of the moon, upon the famous platform of Elsinore.