The circumstances I am about to relate to you are true.

They happen to myself, and my recollection of them is as vivid as if they had taken place

only yesterday.

Twenty years, however, have gone by since that night.

During those twenty years, I have told the story to but one other

person. I tell it now with a reluctance which I find difficult to overcome. All I ask is that

you will abstain from forcing your own conclusions upon me. I want nothing explained away. I desire

no arguments. My mind on the subject is made up, and having the

testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer to abide by it.

It was just 20 years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season, I had

been out all day with my gun, and I had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east, the month, December,

just a few days before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 1861. The place, a bleak wide moor in the

far north of New England, and I had lost my way. It was not a pleasant place in which to lose one's

way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming snowstorm had just fluttered

down upon the ground.

The gray evening was closing in all around.

I shaded my eyes with my hand and stared anxiously into the gathering darkness, where

the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills, some ten or twelve miles distant.

Not the faintest smoke wreath, not the tiniest cultivated patch or fence or sheep track

met my eyes in any direction.

There was nothing for it but to walk on

and take my chance of finding what shelter I could.

...