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outside lamps of a tavern, and thinking this might be a beacon to attract someone of conniving motives, I rushed down and burst inside. I pushed through the clusters of men intent on their drinks, and at the end of a long row I saw one crumpled over a table. His once-fancy coat was just the one I’d noticed worn by my phantom.
    I took his arm. He weakly lifted his head and gave a start upon seeing my intent countenance.
    “A mistake. Sir. Sir! A grave mistake on my part!” he cried. His words died together drunkenly.
    This was not the man either.
    “Mr. Watchman,” a nearby inebriate explained to me in a sympathetic loud whisper. “That’s John Watchman. I drink to him, the poor fellow! And I drink to you, too, if you’d like.”
    “John Watchman,” I agreed, though at that point this name meant nothing to me (if I had seen it in the newspaper columns, it was with only passing attention). I left some copper coins for the continuation of the man’s indulgences, and quickly returned above to the street to press ahead with the search.
    I saw the true culprit revealed to me where the fog lessened. At one given time it seemed, in my distress, that all the inhabitants of the street were giving chase to him, summoning their courage to hunt him.
    Did I say our Phantom was my height? Yes, and that is true. But this is not to suggest that he resembled me in any way. Indeed, I was perhaps the only one on the streets then not bearing a strict similarity to my subject. I, with dusty hair of a color like the skin of a tree, which I kept well-groomed, and small, reasonable, clean-shaven features too often called boyish. He—this Phantom—had different proportions to his body. His legs seemed nearly double mine in length, so that however briskly I went along, I could not reduce that gap between us.
    As I ran through the prickly mist, I was filled with frantic and excitable thoughts with nothing tying them together except that they thrilled me beyond any logic. I collided with a shoulder, another, and once almost the entire body of a large man who could have flattened me out on the red brick of the side pavement. I slipped on a track of dirt, coating my left side with mud. After that I was all at once alone—nobody in sight.
    I stood perfectly still.
    Now that I’d lost my prey—or he had lost his—my eyes focused, as though I had put on a pair of spectacles. Here I was, not twenty yards away from it: the narrow Presbyterian burial ground, where the thin slabs of stone sloping out from the ground were only barely darker than the air. I tried to think whether the interloper had actually led me here through half of Baltimore as he fled my pursuit. Or had he been gone for the whole length of the chase, before I came near this place? This place where Edgar Poe now rested, but could not.
     
    Many years earlier, when I was but midway through my teen years, there was an incident on a train I should recount. I was riding with my parents. Although the ladies’ car permitted family members of women to sit with them, it was quite full, and only my mother was able to stay. I sat with my father a few cars away, and we walked through the train to visit Mother at regular intervals, into that compartment where no spitting and cursing could take place. After one such excursion, I returned to our seats ahead of Father and found two gentlemen in the seats moments ago occupied by us. I politely explained to the men their mistake. One of the men flew into a violent passion, warning me that I would have to “walk over his dead body” to get our seats back.
    “I shall do that very thing if you do not step aside,” I replied.
    “What did you say, lad?”
    And I repeated the same absurd statement with equal calm.
    Imagine me as rather a thin boy at fifteen—stringy, you can say. Typically, I might have begged the pardon of the occupant and diligently searched out inferior seats. You wonder meanwhile about the second interloper in this episode,