TOOK a large room, far up Broad- 

 way, in a huge old building whose 

 upper stories had been wholly un- 

 occupied for years, until I came. The 

 place had long been given up to dust 

 and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. 

 I seemed groping among the tombs and 

 invading the privacy of the dead, that 

 first night I climbed up to my quarters. 

 For the first time in my life a super- 

 stitious dread came over me ; and as I 

 turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof 

 in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom, 



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