socket, staring straight at me, the hideous, bloody eye I had torn from Herrington’s head on that tragic, never-to-be-forgotten or expiated night!
“As I looked into that awful orb and as it looked back at me, I felt my reason go. Fascinated, I gazed on and on; and the more I looked, the more hideous became the stare that met my stare. How long I sat there, spellbound, hypnotized, I do not know. Finally, it seems hours afterward, I rose, and with a wild, hysterical laugh, lifted the eye out of its socket in that awful box and, putting it between my teeth, crunched it, spitting it out upon the floor a mangled pulp.
“Then, laughing deliriously, I took the box itself and hurled it through the window—into the night. I heard the glass tinkle, I heard the box strike on the ground below. Then I flung myself into a chair and laughed loud and long. It seemed as if I should never stop laughing.
“And there they found me. Ha, ha! Even yet, when I think of it, I must laugh. Ha, ha! Ha, ha!”
I drew back, sickened, as Ainsworth’s maudlin laughter rang through the steel corridors of the madhouse.
That is all. Shortly afterward I left him. Three months later he died—died laughing, laughing insanely.
The Ghost Girl
By William James Price
We parted at the door.
No angry word was said.
One found you stark upon the floor.
And told me you were dead.
Yet never moon shall rise,
Nor sun at evening set,
But I shall feel your flaming eyes
Whose fire I would forget.
And when the shadows creep
Along these ghostly walls,
A phantom wakes me out of sleep
With eery voice that calls.
Alas! am I to blame
Because you love too well?
Why should you nightly call my name,
Your sorry tale to tell?
To that mysterious bourn
Where happy souls abide
Return again, that I who mourn
May know that you have died!
