midnight
If he had been a student of light literature , and imbued with the ghostly associations of the season , he would have gone to his door expecting to behold a weird figure clothed in the vestments of the last century ; or an old woman in ruff and martingale , whose figure in the flesh had once haunted those legal precincts ; or the ghostly semblance of the Baron of Verulam himself , revisiting the glimpses of the moon and the avenue of elms that were planted by his order . In George Sheldon 's nature there was , however , no lurking dread of fiend or phantom . His ideas in connection with ghosts were limited to a white sheet , a broomstick , and a hollow turnip with a lighted candle inside it ; and he would have set down the most awful apparition that ever was revealed to German ghost-seer , with a scornful grin , as a member of the sheet and-hollow-turnip confraternity . `` I know how it 's done , '' he would have said , if the spectral form had glowered upon him in midnight churchyard or ruined abbey . `` You 'd better go and try it on somewhere else , my friend . '' * * * * * To a superstitious mind the THING which crept across the dark lobby and dragged itself into the glare of the gas-lighted office might have seemed , indeed , some creature too loathsome for humanity . A plague-stricken corpse galvanized into a spasmodic life could scarcely have lifted to the light a more awful countenance than that on which George Sheldon looked with mingled anger and disgust .