Most of our foolish conceits explain themselves in some such simple way.

And, yet, for all that, I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,--I felt a stirring in the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of "Lamia." There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie awake and get listening for sounds.

Just keep your ears open any time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a dark night.

What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises you will hear! The stillness of night is a vulgar error.

All the dead things seem to be alive.