It is possible that the facts in regard to the mysterious destruction by fire of an abandoned house on a knoll along the shore of the Seekonk on a little habited district between the Washington and Red Bridges, will never be entirely known. The police have been beset by the usual number of cranks, purporting to offer information about the matter, none more insistent than Arthur Phillips, the descendant of an old East Side family, long resident on Angell Street, a somewhat confused but earnest young man who prepared an account of certain events he alleges led to the fire. Though the police  have interviewed all persons concerned and mentioned in Mr. Phillips' account, no corroboration - save for a statement from a librarian at the Athenaeum, attesting only to the fact that Mr. Phillips did once meet Miss Rose Dexter there - could be found to support Mr. Phillips allegations. The manuscript follows.

1.

The nocturnal streets of any city along the Eastern Seaboard afford the nightwalker many a glimpse of the strange and terrible, the macabre and outré, for darkness draws from the crevices and crannies, the attic rooms and cellar hideways of the city those human beings who, for obscure reasons lost in the past, choose to keep the day secure in their grey niches - the misshapen, the lonely, the sick, the very old, the haunted, and those lost souls who are forever seeking their identities under cover of the night, which is beneficient for them as the cold light of day can never be. These are the hurt by life, the maimed, men and women who have never recovered from the traumas of childhood or who have willingly sought after experiences not meant for man to know, and every place where the human society has been concentrated for any considerable length of time abounds with them, though they are seen only in the dark hours, emerging like nocturnal moths to move about in their narrow environs for a few brief  hours before they must escape daylight once more.