Mr. Flosky was not prepared for this
apparition, and made the best of his way out at the
opposite door. Mr. Hilary and Marionetta followed
screaming. The honourable Mr. Listless, by two turns of
his body, first rolled off the sofa and then under it.
Rev. Mr. Larynx leaped up and fled with so much
precipitation that he overturned the table on the foot
of Mr. Glowry. Mr. Glowry roared with pain in the ears
of Mr. Toobad. Mr. Toobad's alarm so bewildered his
senses that missing the door he threw up one of the
windows, jumped out in his panic, and plunged over head
and ears in the moat. Mr. Asterias and his son, who
were on the watch for their mermaid, were attracted by
the splashing, threw a net over him, and dragged him to
land."
In Melincourt Castle a very spacious wing was left free to the
settlement of a colony of ghosts, and the Rev. Mr. Portpipe often
passed the night in one of the dreaded apartments over a blazing
fire, with the same invariable exorcising apparatus of a large
venison pasty, a little prayer-book, and three bottles of
Madeira. Yet despite this excellent mockery, Peacock in _Gryll
Grange_ devotes a chapter to tales of terror and wonder, singling
out the works of Charles Brockden Brown for praise, especially
his _Wieland_, "one of the few tales in which the final
explanation of the apparently supernatural does not destroy or
diminish the original effect.
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