Ah me, ah me! No other ghost has haunted the boy's room, my
friends, since I have occupied it, than the ghost of my own
childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy
belief. Many a time have I pursued the phantom: never with this
man's stride of mine to come up with it, never with these man's
hands of mine to touch it, never more to this man's heart of mine to
hold it in its purity. And here you see me working out, as
cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of shaving in the glass
a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with
the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.
THE TRIAL FOR MURDER.
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among
persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their
own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange
sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such
wise would find no parallel or response in a listener's internal
life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller,
who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of
a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same
traveller, having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of
thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental
impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it.
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