You know how your son is suffering, and you have come--you have come to testify to my innocence.

I thank you, father.
Give me your hand, and with a firm filial hand-clasp I will respond to your unexpected visit.

Don't you want to?
Let me have your hand.

Give me your hand, or I will call you a liar!" I stretched out my hand, but of course the hallucination did not deem it worth while to respond, and I was forever deprived of the opportunity of feeling the touch of a ghost.

The cry which I uttered and which so upset my friend, the jailer, creating some confusion in the prison, was called forth by the sudden disappearance of the phantom--it was so sudden that the space in the place where the corpse had been seemed to me more terrible than the corpse itself.
Such is the power of human imagination when, excited, it creates phantoms and visions, peopling the bottomless and ever silent emptiness with them.