The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 157: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

150 What Shall She Do? quently he never heard again from his lady love. Years passed, and he had concluded that she had forgotten. Then he came back and visited the old home to find it gone to decay and rendered uncanny by the story that it was haunted. He fitted up the little back room that had once been his when a boy and there passed the winter holidays. During those weeks he was haunted, haunted by sad memories which clung to this room of his happy | boyhood. There he had lived and grown to manhood, and there, after the house was wrapped in slumber, he had tossed upon his bed, as most of us have done some time or other, and run over in his mind the day’s work, how he had passed a sweet afternoon with his love, his visit to the little school-house, their rambles through the woods, and afterward of his days in the city counting room. Now that he had come back to the place after ten years exile, each night brought to him a review of those days. The story of the house being haunted gave the idea for his story. Yet even here, where he should have been pa- thetic, he must needs be ridiculous. He himself told me that he knew that if “Nellie” should see it she would un- derstand, as for anyone else he did not care. There are such persons—I have often met them—who cannot speak of their private feelings in any other than a light manner for fear of ridicule, and can we blame an old bachelor for his little crochets? So he tried to make the story comic. Ah! well, old man, you may sneer, but I knew from the first that last paragraph came from the heart which treas- GOMIIGDOoOKs (E(o)