So unreal and dreamlike, this apparition in the night seemed, lit by periodic flashes of lightening. I was tired, and more than usually susceptible . . . yet the night had no unfamiliar effects for me, even on the borders of this great river.

Perhaps I was still alarmed from that moment, an hour before, when I raised my lantern in that room, to gaze upon the doleful mystery of half a century back -- and current site of an even more moving mystery. Yet that experience had the sharpness of fact -- while this lightning-lit figure seemed almost a figment of imagination.

I was near him, in the darkness. Then the long-delayed next flash of lightning lit the scene -- and I saw him still standing there, but no longer in an attitude of contemplation. He bent over the waters -- and I saw his clenched right hand fall against his breast and heard from his lips one word --

"Guilty!"

Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935), novelist and poet, was author of such novels of mystery and detection as The Leavenworth Case and The Forsaken Inn.