Ch. 1 - The Gift Bestowed

Everybody said so.

Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true.
Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the
general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has
taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong,
that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may
sometimes be right; "but THAT'S no rule," as the ghost of Giles
Scroggins says in the ballad.

The dread word, GHOST, recalls me.

Everybody said he looked like a haunted man. The extent of my
present claim for everybody is, that they were so far right. He
did.

Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his
black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and
well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-
weed, about his face,--as if he had been, through his whole life, a
lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of
humanity,--but might have said he looked like a haunted man?

Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy,
shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never,
with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or
of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it
was the manner of a haunted man?

Who could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave,
with a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set
himself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a
haunted man?

Who that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part
laboratory,--for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned
man in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of
aspiring ears and eyes hung daily,--who that had seen him there,
upon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments
and books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the
wall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by
the flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some
of these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held
liquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to
uncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and
vapour;--who that had seen him then, his work done, and he
pondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame,
moving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead,
would not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber
too?

Who might not, by a very easy flight of fancy, have believed that
everything about him took this haunted tone, and that he lived on
haunted ground?

His dwelling was so solitary and vault-like,--an