The circumstance I am about to mention will give you some notion of the extreme to which these excited feelings had worked upon her nerves.  I was that night suddenly awakened by a piercing scream—­I started upright in the bed, and saw my wife standing at the bedside, white as ashes with terror.  It was some seconds, so startled was I, before I could find words to ask her the cause of her affright.  She caught my wrist in her icy grasp, and climbed, trembling violently, into bed.  Notwithstanding my repeated entreaties, she continued for a long time stupified and dumb.  At length, however, she told me, that having lain awake for a long time, she felt, on a sudden, that she could pray, and lighting the candle, she had stolen from beside me, and kneeled down for the purpose.  She had, however, scarcely assumed the attitude of prayer, when somebody, she said, clutched her arm violently near the wrist, and she heard, at the same instant, some blasphemous menace, the import of which escaped her the moment it was spoken, muttered close in her ear.  This terrifying interruption was the cause of the scream which had awakened me; and the condition in which she continued during the remainder of the night confirmed me more than ever in the conviction, that she was suffering under some morbid action of the nervous system.

After this event, which I had no hesitation in attributing to fancy, she became literally afraid to pray, and her misery and despondency increased proportionately.

It was shortly after this that an unusual pressure of business called me into town one evening after office hours.  I had left my dear little wife tolerably well, and little Fanny was to be her companion until I returned.  She and her little companion occupied the same room in which we sat on the memorable evening which witnessed the arrival of our eccentric guest.  Though usually a lively child, it most provokingly happened upon this night that Fanny was heavy and drowsy to excess.  Her mamma would have sent her to bed, but that she now literally feared to be left alone; although, however, she could not so far overcome her horror of solitude as to do this, she yet would not persist in combating the poor child’s sleepiness.

Accordingly, little Fanny was soon locked in a sound sleep, while her mamma quietly pursued her work beside her.  They had been perhaps some ten minutes thus circumstanced, when my wife heard the window softly raised from without—­a bony hand parted the curtains, and Mr. Smith leaned into the room.

She was so utterly overpowered at sight of this apparition, that even had it, as she expected, climbed into the room, she told me she could not have uttered a sound, or stirred from the spot where she sate transfixed and petrified.