This story, published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1858, was the first of the great weird-scientific stories. It won immediate popularity for the author--a popularity which continued unbroken until his death in the Civil War. From a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been towards microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me, by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole, in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only …
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