{"product_id":"2940013197435","title":"THE HAUNTED MAN AND THE GHOST'S BARGAIN","description":"CHAPTER I--The Gift Bestowed\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEverybody said so.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFar be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true.\u003cbr\u003eEverybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.  In the\u003cbr\u003egeneral experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has\u003cbr\u003etaken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong,\u003cbr\u003ethat the authority is proved to be fallible.  Everybody may\u003cbr\u003esometimes be right; \"but THAT'S no rule,\" as the ghost of Giles\u003cbr\u003eScroggins says in the ballad.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe dread word, GHOST, recalls me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEverybody said he looked like a haunted man.  The extent of my\u003cbr\u003epresent claim for everybody is, that they were so far right.  He\u003cbr\u003edid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his\u003cbr\u003eblack-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and\u003cbr\u003ewell-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-\u003cbr\u003eweed, about his face,--as if he had been, through his whole life, a\u003cbr\u003elonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of\u003cbr\u003ehumanity,--but might have said he looked like a haunted man?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy,\u003cbr\u003eshadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never,\u003cbr\u003ewith a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or\u003cbr\u003eof listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it\u003cbr\u003ewas the manner of a haunted man?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho could have heard his voice, slow-speaking, deep, and grave,\u003cbr\u003ewith a natural fulness and melody in it which he seemed to set\u003cbr\u003ehimself against and stop, but might have said it was the voice of a\u003cbr\u003ehaunted man?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho that had seen him in his inner chamber, part library and part\u003cbr\u003elaboratory,--for he was, as the world knew, far and wide, a learned\u003cbr\u003eman in chemistry, and a teacher on whose lips and hands a crowd of\u003cbr\u003easpiring ears and eyes hung daily,--who that had seen him there,\u003cbr\u003eupon a winter night, alone, surrounded by his drugs and instruments\u003cbr\u003eand books; the shadow of his shaded lamp a monstrous beetle on the\u003cbr\u003ewall, motionless among a crowd of spectral shapes raised there by\u003cbr\u003ethe flickering of the fire upon the quaint objects around him; some\u003cbr\u003eof these phantoms (the reflection of glass vessels that held\u003cbr\u003eliquids), trembling at heart like things that knew his power to\u003cbr\u003euncombine them, and to give back their component parts to fire and\u003cbr\u003evapour;--who that had seen him then, his work done, and he\u003cbr\u003epondering in his chair before the rusted grate and red flame,\u003cbr\u003emoving his thin mouth as if in speech, but silent as the dead,\u003cbr\u003ewould not have said that the man seemed haunted and the chamber\u003cbr\u003etoo?","brand":"SAP","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47147467538672,"sku":"2940013197435","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013197435_p0.jpg?v=1763578067","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013197435","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}