Then the little room downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the floor.

With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was liable to superstitious fancies.
Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.

All the reason in the world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.

That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his chamber after midnight.
But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred for the present.

You will see in what way it happened that my thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures, muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the means of so doing.
Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this time.
It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it that I should sit to him for my portrait.