"
"But the letter--the note with the manuscript?" I put in.
"Oh, I got over that very easily," he said. "I had that written also
on the machine, on thin paper, and traced your signature at the
bottom. It will be all right, my dear fellow. They'll never
suspect."
And then, looking at the spirit-watch which he carried in his
spectral fob-pocket, he vanished, leaving me immersed in the deepest
misery of my life. Not content with ruining me socially, and as a
lecturer; not satisfied with destroying me mentally on the seas, he
had now attacked me on my most vulnerable point, my literary
aspirations. I could not rest until I had read his "three-page
quatrain" on "Immortality." Vulgar as I knew him to be, I felt
confident that over my name something had gone out which even in my
least self-respecting moods I could not tolerate. The only comfort
that came to me was that his verses and his type-writing and his
tracings of my autograph would be as spectral to others as to the
eye not attuned to the seeing of ghosts. I was soon to be
undeceived, however, for the next morning's mail brought to my home
a dozen packages from my best "consumers," containing the maudlin
frivolings of this--this--this--well, there is no polite word to
describe him in any known tongue.
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