I had offered last Friday to make pumpkin-pies—the genuine New England brand, such as my father had eaten at Thanksgiving in the Dorchester homestead.
The colored cooks could not compass the delicacy. He had sent home four bouncing pumpkins on Saturday, and two had been pared, eviscerated, and stewed. I sat at the far end of the table, beating, seasoning, and tasting. My mother was filling candy-bags at the other, when Myrtle rallied her upon not tasting the confectionery, of which she was extravagantly fond.
“Mother is saving up her appetite for the Christmas pig!” she asserted.
“I never eat sweets when I have a headache,” was the answer. “I did not sleep well last night.”
This led to her account of a “queer fright” she had had at midnight, or thereabouts. Awakened from her first sound sleep by the unaccountable thrill of alarm each of us has felt, in the impression that some one or something that has no right to be there, is in the darkened chamber, she lay still with beating heart and listened for further proof of the intrusion. In a few minutes she heard a faint rustle that ran from the farthest window toward her bed, and passed to the door leading into the hall. Thoroughly startled, she shook my father’s shoulder and whispered to him that there was some one in the room. He sprang up, lighted the gas, and made a thorough search of the chamber and the dressing-room. The door was locked, and, besides themselves, there was no occupant of the apartment. He had fallen asleep again, when she heard the same rustling noise, louder and more definite than before. There was no mistaking the direction of the movement. It began at the window, swept by the bed, and was lost at the door. The terrified wife again awoke her husband, and he made the round a second time, with the same result as before.
When the mysterious movement seemed to brush her at the third coming, she aroused her companion in an agony of nervousness:
“I am terribly ashamed of my foolishness,” she told him, shivering with nameless fears; “but there really is something here, now!” He was, as I have said in a former part of my true story, usually so intolerant of nervous whimsies that we forbore to express them in his hearing. He had mellowed and sweetened marvellously within the last few years, as rare vintages are sure to ripen. Arising now, with a good-humored laugh, he made a third exploration of the premises, and with no better result. When he lay down again, he put his hand affectionately upon my mother’s arm with a soothing word:
“I will hold you fast! You are the most precious thing in the house. Neither burglar nor bogie shall get you.”
“What was it?” we asked.
“Oh, probably the wind blowing the shade, or making free with something else that was loose. It was a stormy night. We agreed, this morning, that it must have been that.”