--Alone with the dead! Alone in the night among tombs and graves! How
many readers do not at the sight of these words feel an involuntary
_soupcon_ of a shudder? Would not the cause of this indefinable secret
dread of the darkness which covers a graveyard be a curious matter
of inquiry? Let one ever so cultivated and skeptical, familiar as a
physician or a soldier with the spectacle of death, ever so full of
mental and physical courage, passing alone late at night through a
graveyard, hear the least sound among the graves, or see a moving object
of any kind, especially a white one, and he will instantly feel an
_alloverishness_ foreign to ordinary experience, and I will not answer
for him that his hair does not stand on end and his flesh grow rough as
a nutmeg-grater. A company of three or four persons would feel far less
disturbed. This proves the emotion to be genuine _fear_. And with this
recognized as a fact, ask the question, Of what are you afraid? What
makes your feet stick to the ground so fast, or inspires you to take to
your legs and run for your life? "A ridiculous, foolish superstition,"
reason answers.
I do not intend by this to intimate that you, reader, bold and
courageous person that I know you to be, would not dare to go through a
graveyard at night. By no means. I only predicate the existence within
you of this ridiculous, foolish superstition, and maintain that you
would do so under _all_ circumstances with peculiar feelings which you
did not possess before you entered it and which you will not possess
as soon as you have left it, and under _certain_ circumstances with a
trembling of the nerves and a palpitation of the heart, and that the
occasion _might_ occur when you would be still _more_ strongly and
strangely affected.
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