two hearts, one beating at the rate of a thousand beats a minute, and the other with a slow, dull motion.  My throat, I thought, was filled to the brim with blood, and streams of blood were pouring from my ears.  I felt them gushing warm down my cheeks and neck.  With a maddened, desperate feeling, I fled from the room, and walked over the flat, terraced roof of the house.  My body seemed to shrink and grow rigid as I wrestled with the demon, and my face to become wild, lean and haggard.  Some lines which had struck me, years before, in reading Mrs. Browning’s “Rhyme of the Duchess May,” flashed into my mind:—­

  “And the horse, in stark despair, with his front hoofs poised in air,
    On the last verge, rears amain;
  And he hangs, he rocks between—­and his nostrils curdle in—­
  And he shivers, head and hoof, and the flakes of foam fall off;
    And his face grows fierce and thin.”

That picture of animal terror and agony was mine.  I was the horse, hanging poised on the verge of the giddy tower, the next moment to be borne sheer down to destruction.  Involuntarily, I raised my hand to feel the leanness and sharpness of my face.  Oh horror! the flesh had fallen from my bones, and it was a skeleton head that I carried on my shoulders!  With one bound I sprang to the parapet, and looked down into the silent courtyard, then filled with the shadows thrown into it by the sinking moon.  Shall I cast myself down headlong? was the question I proposed to myself; but though the horror of that skeleton delusion was greater than my fear of death, there was an invisible hand at my breast which pushed me away from the brink.

I made my way back to the room, in a state of the keenest suffering.  My companion was still a locomotive, rushing to and fro, and jerking out his syllables with the disjointed accent peculiar to a steam-engine.  His mouth had turned to brass, like mine, and he raised the pitcher to his lips in the attempt to moisten it, but before he had taken a mouthful, set the pitcher down again with a yell of laughter, crying out:  “How can I take water into my boiler, while I am letting off steam?”

But I was now too far gone to feel the absurdity of this, or his other exclamations.  I was sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of unutterable agony and despair.  For, although I was not conscious of real pain in any part of my body, the cruel tension to which my nerves had been subjected filled me through and through with a sensation of distress which was far more severe than pain itself.  In addition to this, the remnant of will with which I struggled against the demon, became gradually weaker, and I felt that I should soon be powerless in his hands.  Every effort to preserve my reason was accompanied by a pang of mortal fear, lest what I now experienced was insanity, and would hold mastery over me for ever.  The thought of death, which also haunted me, was far less bitter than this dread.  I knew that in the