The Eyes

I

WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an
excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin's, by a tale of Fred
Murchard's--the narrative of a strange personal visitation.

Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a
coal fire, Culwin's library, with its oak walls and dark old
bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly
experiences at first hand being, after Murchard's brilliant opening,
the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our
group and tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of
us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to
fulfil the condition imposed. It surprised us all to find that we
could muster such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of
us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham--whose story
was the slightest of the lot--had the habit of sending our souls
into the invisible. So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be
proud of our seven "exhibits," and none of us would have dreamed of
expecting an eighth from our host.

Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his
arm-chair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the
cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man
likely to be favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination
enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his
guests. By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist
tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of
the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been,
then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached
observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out
of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at
the back of the house, but never, as far as one knew, showing the
least desire to jump on the stage and do a "turn."

Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his
having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in
a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men
knew of his character than my mother's assertion that he had once
been "a charming little man with nice eyes" corresponded to any
possible reconstitution of his dry thwarted physiognomy.

"He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,"
Murchard had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather,"
some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this
description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes
in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a
leisure which he had nursed and