The Argosy — page 117: what you’re looking at

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

MARGARET RYMER. HEY had gone through the snow to evening service at North Crabb, the Squire, Mrs. Todhetley, and Tod, leaving me at home with one of my splitting headaches. Thomas had come in to ask if I would have the lamp, but I told him I would rather be without it. So there I sat on alone, beside the fire, listening to Hannah putting the children to bed upstairs, and looking sleepily out at the snowy landscape. As the fire became dim, sending the room into gloom, the light outside grew stronger. The moon was high; clear and bright as crystal : what with that, and the perfectly white snow that lay on every- thing, the night seemed nearly as light as day. The grass plat outside - was a smooth white plain, the clustering shrubs beyond it being also white. The room grew darker, the Jandscape lighter. Asleep, in another minute, I should inevitably have been, but for a circumstance that suddenly arose. Allin a moment—lI saw not how or whence it came —a dark figure appeared on the grass plat, close before the bank of shrubs, right in front of me; the figure of a man, wrapped in a big preat-coat. He was standing still and gazing fixedly at the house. Gazing, as it seemed (though that was impossible) at we. I was wide awake at once and situng bolt upright in the chair. Yes, there could be no mistake ; and it was no delusion. The man was a tall man, strong and bony, with a mass of hair on his face. What could he want? Was it a robber reconnoitring the premises ; peering and peeping to ascertain whether all the world was at church before he broke in to rifle the house ? No one, void of such an experience, can imagine how dark he looked, standing there, amid the whiteness of all the scene around. In one sense, he stood out more plainly than he could have done by day- light, because the contrast was greater. But this kind of light did not show his features: which were shrouded in obscurity. Presently he moved. His head went this way and that, and he took a step forward. Evidently he was trying to see whether the parlour where I sat was empty or occupied. Should I go out to him? Or should I fling up the window and call out to ask what he wanted. I was not fmghtened: don’t let anyboly think that: but the watching him brought to me rather a creepy kind of sensation. As I left the chair quietly to open the window, I heard the catch of the garden gate, and somebody came whistling up the path. The man vanished as if by magic. While I looked, he was gone. ECOMRRIC OOO Ss (GO)