THE SLIM YOUNG MAN'S STORY.
I am by profession a reporter, and writer for the press. I live at Pultneyville. I have always had a passion for the marvellous, and have been distinguished for my facility in tracing out mysteries, and solving enigmatical occurrences. On the night of the 17th June, 1845, I left my office and walked homeward. The night was bright and starlight. I was revolving in my mind the words of a singular item I had just read in the "Times." I had reached the darkest portion of the road, and found my self mechanically repeating: "An elderly gentleman a week ago left his lodgings on the Kent Road," when suddenly I heard a step behind me.
I turned quickly, with an expression of horror in my face, and by the light of the newly risen moon beheld an elderly gentleman, with green cotton umbrella, approaching me. His hair, which was snow white, was parted over a broad, open forehead. The expression of his face, which was slightly flushed, was that of amiability verging almost upon imbecility. There was a strange, inquiring look about the widely opened mild blue eye,--a look that might have been intensified to insanity, or modified to idiocy. As he passed me, he paused and partly turned his face, with a gesture of inquiry. I see him still, his white locks blowing in the evening breeze, his hat a little on the back of his head, and his figure painted in relief against the dark blue sky.
Suddenly he turned his mild eye full upon me. A weak smile played about his thin lips. In a voice which had something of the tremulousness of age and the self-satisfied chuckle of imbecility in it, he asked, pointing to the rising moon, "Why?--hush!"
He had dodged behind me, and appeared to be looking anxiously down the road. I could feel his aged frame shaking with terror as he laid his thin hands upon my shoulders and faced me in the direction of the supposed danger.
"Hush! did you not hear them coming?"
I listened; there was no sound but the soughing of the roadside trees in the evening wind. I endeavored to reassure him, with such success that in a few moments the old weak smile appeared on his benevolent face.
"Why?--" But the look of interrogation was succeeded by a hopeless blankness.
"Why!" I repeated with assuring accents.
"Why," he said, a gleam of intelligence flickering over his face, "is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean, casting a flood of light o'er hill and dale, like-- Why," he repeated, with a feeble smile, "is yonder moon, as she sails in the blue empyrean--"
He hesitated,--stammered,--and gazed at me hopelessly, with the tears dripping from his moist and widely opened eyes.
I took his hand kindly in my own. "Casting a shadow o'er hill and dale," I repeated quietly, leading him up the subject, "like--Come, now."
"Ah!" he said, pressing my hand tremulously, "you know it?"
"I do. Why is it like--the--eh--the commodious mansion on the Limehouse Road?"
A blank stare only followed. He shook his head sadly. "Like the young men wanted for a light, genteel employment?"
He wagged his feeble old head cunningly.
"Or, Mr. Ward," I said, with bold confidence, "like the mysterious disappearance from the Kent Road?"
The moment was full of suspense. He did not seem to hear me.
Suddenly he turned.
"Ha!"
I darted forward. But he had vanished in the darkness.
