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The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 06 - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes by Unknown
page 111 of 645 (17%)
moved.

To return to Goslar. "The highest principle is Reason," said I
soothingly to myself, as I slid into bed. But it availed me nothing. I
had just been reading in Varnhagen von Ense's _German Tales,_ which I
had brought with me from Clausthal, that terrible story of the son who
went about to murder his father and was warned in the night by the ghost
of his mother. The wonderful truthfulness with which this story is
depicted, caused, while reading it, a shudder of horror in all my veins.
Ghost-stories invariably thrill us with additional horror when read
during a journey, and by night in a town, in a house, and in a room
where we have never been before. We involuntarily reflect, "How many
horrors may have been perpetrated on this very spot where I now lie!"
Meanwhile, the moon shone into my room in a doubtful, suspicious manner;
all kinds of uncalled-for shapes quivered on the walls, and as I raised
myself in bed and glanced fearfully toward them, I beheld--

There is nothing so uncanny as when a man accidentally sees his own face
by moonlight in a mirror. At the same instant there struck a
deep-booming, yawning bell, and that so slowly and wearily that after
the twelfth stroke I firmly believed that twelve full hours must have
passed and that it would begin to strike twelve all over again. Between
the last and next to the last tones, there struck in very abruptly, as
if irritated and scolding, another bell, which was apparently out of
patience with the slowness of its colleague. As the two iron tongues
were silenced, and the stillness of death sank over the whole house, I
suddenly seemed to hear, in the corridor before my chamber, something
halting and shuffling along, like the unsteady steps of an old man. At
last my door opened, and there entered slowly the late departed Dr. Saul
Ascher. A cold fever ran through me. I trembled like an ivy leaf and
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