The singularity of
the narrative seems to me to be this, that it describes the ghost of a
hand, and no more. The person to whom that hand belonged never once
appeared: nor was it a hand separated from a body, but only a hand so
manifested and introduced that its owner was always, by some crafty
accident, hidden from view.
In the year 1819, at a college breakfast, I met a Mr. Prosser--a thin,
grave, but rather chatty old gentleman, with very white hair drawn back
into a pigtail--and he told us all, with a concise particularity, a
story of his cousin, James Prosser, who, when an infant, had slept for
some time in what his mother said was a haunted nursery in an old house
near Chapelizod, and who, whenever he was ill, over-fatigued, or in
anywise feverish, suffered all through his life as he had done from a
time he could scarce remember, from a vision of a certain gentleman, fat
and pale, every curl of whose wig, every button and fold of whose laced
clothes, and every feature and line of whose sensual, benignant, and
unwholesome face, was as minutely engraven upon his memory as the dress
and lineaments of his own grandfather's portrait, which hung before him
every day at breakfast, dinner, and supper.
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