In an old cabin on Canadarago lake, there is a freestanding field stone chimney. In the chimney there is a stone that looks like a skull. It is canted forward slightly; if ones imagines it with eyes looking down, then it stares into the open fire; if straight ahead, then it stares at the floor of the great room where the children used to sleep.
The question is how did it get there? The mason, you will say. Probable enough, but I have inquired with the living, & what remains of the dead in the guest bookânone, it seems, had set their eyes in those stone sockets before last night. Strange, for all the eyes I directed to the place were unanimous. It is a skull which went unnoticed eighty years.
Allowing it was not a trowel that mortared this death's head into the hearth, many tales present themselves to an idle & viscious writer. There is every chance to steal from Poe, or to confabulate some Hestian cult. But I am fortunate; I have been turned aside from these temptations. In the light of the early morning, it does not look so much like a skull.