voice or song of some returning reveller. Then the jangle of the milkman's cans would usher in the dawn, and gradually life would awake into abundant noise. Then, too, I would be aroused to consciousness of the ghastly sentinel who watched over me; and under the dead fascination of his motionless eyes I would hear the noises of the day. The voices and laughter, the noise of people moving in the street or in the neighbouring houses, seemed unnatural and weird; the jarring and incessant clang of a hundred different church - bells filled me with gloomy thoughts, and powerfully increased the nervous terrors of my fevered mind. There was no cheerful sunshine to exhilarate my senses, but that dim murky fog that London knows so well in winter. And when through it there arose the discordant iteration of street-sellers' cries, it seemed to my imagination, circumstanced as I was, that these were the howls of tormenting fiends.

You see that my mind was becoming distraught as the anguish of my body and the still constraint of my position affected it. All sorts of horrible ideas kept thronging into my brain; and as the hours crept slowly on, and still my odious captor held his basilisk gaze upon me, and fed on my mental life, was it any wonder that my reason became enthralled like that of one in delirium tremens?

So, what seemed interminable ages wore on, and weaker, with faculties fast becoming more and more estranged under the torture of body and misery of mind, my stay in purgatory drew to a close. It was the Monday afternoon, though I knew it not.

A wild terrifying notion seized me that the body before me had been entered by a demon, whose special mission it was to subject me to greater and yet inconceiv

able torture. Through an endless time I watched the shapeless form, the detestable face, the horrorstriking eyes-watched and waited in all the anguish of prolonged suspense for the awful climax of my doom.

At length came the supreme moment. I saw the dreadful eyes rapidly flicker and move; I saw a red flush spring to the dead man's cheeks, a movement to the lips, a stealthy twitching to the limbs and body. It seemed to me that the moment was come I had been expecting through a lifetime. Without astonishment, but with immense, unutterable, overwhelming horror, I saw the dead man spring lightly to his feet, and, with outstretched arms, move towards me. He spoke the tones were Masseter's, the voice was the demon's. What the words were I know not; they brought to my mind the last tremendous shock of awful fear, under whose appalling terror I happily sank into unconsciousness.

Yes, it was a case of catalepsy, so they told me at the hospital weeks afterwards, when they judged me able to hear of it; for I was long ill with brain-fever as a sequel to my adventure. Mr. Masseter had been subject to fits of this kind formerly, but had supposed his liability to them to have ceased. He told the hospital physicians that he had felt no premonitory symptoms whatever, and that on awakening to consciousness he merely thought he had fallen, neither knowing he had had a fit, nor being sensible of the lapse of time. Finding me ill and in a swoon, he at once released me, and, not succeeding in his efforts to bring me round, feared he knew not what, and bore me off to the nearest hospital. There he discovered the real date of the day, and so became alive to what