"During the burning process, the operator sat upon the stool, and gazed fixedly and intently upon, or rather toward, the open sash, while the rest of us were chatting merrily, and wondering what would be the result of all these weird and curious preparations.
"I said the rest of us were merrily chatting, but must qualify that observation by excluding from this employment one person, and that person was--myself, for I found it utterly impossible to mingle in the conversation with that abandon and unreserve which characterized the others. It was altogether beyond my power to forget the tremendous experiences of that very day, which I had undergone. A weight was on my spirit that could not be lifted off. The 'Ghost of Ravalette' seemed to be invisibly hovering over me, and although unseen, his presence seemed to be palpably felt by me. The events at Belleville constantly obtruded themselves before the eye of the mind; the affair at the gardener's, the singular result of his impromptu wager, the woman at the _Barrière_, and, above all, the frightful occurrences at the Rue Michel le Compte, with its sure--absolutely sure--termination on the Guillotine--the miserable and ignominious death of D'Emprat, and the unearthly means whereby his deed of crime--the crime a horrible murder, committed thirty-seven years before--the unearthly and mysterious means, I repeat, by which his guilt was brought to light--this, all this, so oppressed me that I could not take a present interest in what was transpiring about me. Indeed, I cared little for either Mai or his tricks--which, from observing the method of his preparations, I had already not only despised, but put down to the score of legerdemain--clever and surprising, but still nothing more than legerdemain.
"How rudely this conceit was broken up, how horribly I was convinced of my mistaken estimate of the man before us, will very soon be seen. As for his skill in detecting the coin, the sofa, and the plates, I had already secretly accounted. I remembered Caspar Hauser, and several other _Sensitives_, who could detect the presence of metals by what may be called 'magnetic sense.' His description of the dark bed-room _au troisième_, was very simple, for nearly all old houses have such chambers on that floor; this was an old house; Vatterale saw it, and made what preliminary capital he could from his acuteness. With the present weight of experience; with the memory of the deeds of the mystical Ravalette still fresh in mind, of course I could not be very highly interested in such displays of minor magic as I felt convinced were very shortly to be made by the conjuring gentleman before us.