It is an awful thing to go down quick
among the dead with scarcely one-half of your life completed. It is a thousand
times more awful to wait as I do in your midst, for I know not what
unimaginable terror. Pity me, at least on the score of my "delusion," for I
know you will never believe what I have written here Yet as surely as ever a
man was done to death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man.
In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I
killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon
me.
* * * * * * *
MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY
As I came through the Desert thus it was--As I came through the Desert.
--The City of Dreadful Night.
Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and
shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in
building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real
insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon
treating his ghosts--he has published half a workshopful of them--with levity.
He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt
outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a
Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost,
and particularly an Indian one.
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