recollection, or any sympathy that is good for me, or others.  What 
shall I lose, if I assent to this?  What else will pass from my 
remembrance?"

"No knowledge; no result of study; nothing but the intertwisted 
chain of feelings and associations, each in its turn dependent on, 
and nourished by, the banished recollections.  Those will go."

"Are they so many?" said the haunted man, reflecting in alarm.

"They have been wont to show themselves in the fire, in music, in 
the wind, in the dead stillness of the night, in the revolving 
years," returned the Phantom scornfully.

"In nothing else?"

The Phantom held its peace.

But having stood before him, silent, for a little while, it moved 
towards the fire; then stopped.

"Decide!" it said, "before the opportunity is lost!"

"A moment!  I call Heaven to witness," said the agitated man, "that 
I have never been a hater of any kind, - never morose, indifferent, 
or hard, to anything around me.  If, living here alone, I have made 
too much of all that was and might have been, and too little of 
what is, the evil, I believe, has fallen on me, and not on others.  
But, if there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of 
antidotes and knowledge how to use them, use them?  If there be 
poison in my mind, and through this fearful shadow I can cast it 
out, shall I not cast it out?"

"Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?"

"A moment longer!" he answered hurriedly.  "I WOULD FORGET IT IF I 
COULD!  Have I thought that, alone, or has it been the thought of 
thousands upon thousands, generation after generation?  All human 
memory is fraught with sorrow and trouble.  My memory is as the 
memory of other men, but other men have not this choice.  Yes, I 
close the bargain.  Yes!  I WILL forget my sorrow, wrong, and 
trouble!"

"Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?"

"It is!"

"IT IS.  And take this with you, man whom I here renounce!  The 
gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will.  
Without recovering yourself the power that you have yielded up, you 
shall henceforth destroy its like in all whom you approach.  Your 
wisdom has discovered that the memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble 
is the lot of all mankind, and that mankind would be the happier, 
in its other memories, without it.  Go!  Be its benefactor!  Freed 
from such remembrance, from this hour, carry involuntarily the 
blessing of such freedom with you.  Its diffusion is inseparable 
and inalienable from you.  Go!  Be happy in the good you have won, 
and in the good you do!"

The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while it 
spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban; and which had 
gradually advanced its eyes so close to his, that he could see how 
they did not participate in the terrible smile upon its face, but 
were a fixed, unalterable, steady horror melted before him and was 
gone.

As he stood rooted to the spot, possessed by fear and wonder, and 
imagining he heard repeated in melancholy echoes, dying away 
fainter and fainter, the words, "Destroy its like in all whom you 
approach!" a shrill cry reached his ears.  It came, not from the 
passages beyond the door, but from another part of the old 
building, and sounded like the cry of some one in the dark who had 
lost the way.

He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be assured 
of his identity, and then shouted in reply, loudly and wildly; for 
there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if he too were 
lost.

The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp, and 
raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to 
pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured, - which 
adjoined his room.  Associated with youth and animation, and a high 
amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a 
moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of 
it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death.

"Halloa!" he cried.  "Halloa!  This way!  Come to the light!"  
When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other 
raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the 
place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and 
crouched down in a corner.

"What is it?" he said, hastily.

He might have asked "What is it?" even had he seen it well, as 
presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its 
corner.

A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form