I might have slept some four or five hours, and a dreamless and satisfying sleep it was; but certain it is—­let scholiasts say what they will, and skeptics throw doubts by handfulls on the assertions of metaphysicians—­that, before I awoke, and in my dreamless slumber, I had a visible perception of peril—­a consciousness of the hovering presence of death!  How to describe my feelings I know not; but, as we have all read and heard that, if the eyes of a watcher are steadily fixed on the countenance of a sleeper for a certain length of time, the slumberer will be sure to start up—­wakened by the mysterious magnetism of a recondite principle of clairvoyance; so it was that, with shut eyes and drowsed-up senses, an inward ability was conferred upon me to detect the living from the presence of danger near me—­to see, though sleep-blind, the formless shape of a mysterious horror crouching beside me; and, as if the peril that was my nightmate was of a nature to be quickened into fatal activity by any motion on my part, I felt in my very stupor the critical necessity of lying quite still; so that, when I at last awoke and felt that as I lay with my face toward the roof, there was a thick, heavy, cold, creeping thing upon my chest, I stirred not, nor uttered a word of panic.  Danger and fear may occasionally dull the sense and paralyse the faculties, but they more frequently sharpen both, and ere I could wink my eye, I was broad awake and aware that, coiling and coiling itself up into a circle of twists, an enormous serpent was on my breast.  When I tell you that the whole of my chest, and even the pit of my stomach, were covered with the cold, scaly proportions of the reptile, you will own that it must have been one of considerable size.

What my thoughts were—­so made up of abhorrence, dread, and the expectation—­nay, assurance of speedy death, that must follow any movement on my part—­I can never hope to tell in language sufficiently distinct and vivid to convey their full force.  It was evident the loathsome creature had at length settled itself to sleep; and I felt thankful that, attracted by my breath, it had not approached the upper part of my throat.  It became quite still, and its weighty pressure—­its first clammy chillness becoming gradually (so it seemed to me) of a burning heat—­and the odious, indescribable odor which exhaled from its body and pervaded the whole air—­so overwhelmed me, that it was only by a severe struggle I preserved myself from shrieking.  As it was, a cold sweat burst from every pore.  I could hear the beating of my heart—­and I felt, to my increased dismay, that the palsy of terror had began to agitate my limbs!  “It will wake,” thought I, “and then all is over!” At this juncture, something—­it might have been a wall-lizard, or a large beetle—­fell from the ceiling upon my left arm, which lay stretched at my side.  The snake, uncoiling its head, raised itself, with a low hiss, and then, for the first time,