It is difficult to explain the attraction which the uncanny and even
the horrible have for most minds. I have seen a delicate woman half
fascinated, but wholly disgusted, by one of the most unseemly of
reptiles, vulgarly known as the "blowing viper" of the Alleghanies. She
would look at it, and turn away with irresistible shuddering and the
utmost loathing, and yet turn to look at it again and again, only to
experience the same spasm of disgust. In spite of her aversion, she must
have relished the sort of electric mental shock that the sight gave her.
I can no more account for the fascination for us of the stories of
ghosts and "appearances," and those weird tales in which the dead are
the chief characters; nor tell why we should fall into converse about
them when the winter evenings are far spent, the embers are glazing over
on the hearth, and the listener begins to hear the eerie noises in the
house. At such times one's dreams become of importance, and people like
to tell them and dwell upon them, as if they were a link between the
known and unknown, and could give us a clew to that ghostly region which
in certain states of the mind we feel to be more real than that we see.
Recently, when we were, so to say, sitting around the borders of the
supernatural late at night, MANDEVILLE related a dream of his which he
assured us was true in every particular, and it interested us so much
that we asked him to write it out. In doing so he has curtailed it, and
to my mind shorn it of some of its more vivid and picturesque features.
He might have worked it up with more art, and given it a finish
which the narration now lacks, but I think best to insert it in its
simplicity. It seems to me that it may properly be called,