Three Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens
Page: 43

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.
To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such
subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our
experiences of these subjective things as we do our experiences of
objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of
experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in
respect of being miserably imperfect.

In what I am going to relate, I have no intention of setting up,
opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of
the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a
late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have
followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of
Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It
may be necessary to state as to this last, that the sufferer (a
lady) was in no degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken
assumption on that head might suggest an explanation of a part of my