While I was thus lost in a sorrowful reverie, the gentleman who had stood near me at the grave was once more at my side.  The face of the stranger, though I could not call it handsome, was very remarkable; its expression was the purest and noblest I could conceive, and it was made very beautiful by a look of such compassion as I never saw before.

“Why do you sorrow as one without hope?” he said, gently.

“I have no hope,” I answered.

“Nay, I think you have,” he answered again; “and I am sure you will soon have more.  That little child for which you grieve, has escaped the dangers and miseries of life; its body has perished; but he will receive in the end the crown of life.  God has given him an early victory.”

I know not what it was in him that rebuked my sullen pride, and humbled and saddened me, as I listened to this man.  He was dressed in deep mourning, and looked more serene, noble, and sweet than any I had ever seen.  He was young, too, as I have said, and his voice very clear and harmonious.  He talked to me for a long time, and I listened to him with involuntary reverence.  At last, however, he left me, saying he had often seen me walking into town, about the same hour that he used to go that way, and that if he saw me again he would walk with me, and so we might reason of these things together.

It was late when I returned to my home, now a house of mourning.

PART II

Our home was one of sorrow and of fear.  The child’s death had stricken us with terror no less than grief.  Referring it, as we both tacitly did, to the mysterious and fiendish agency of the abhorred being whom, in an evil hour, we had admitted into our house, we both viewed him with a degree and species of fear for which I can find no name.

I felt that some further calamity was impending.  I could not hope that we were to be delivered from the presence of the malignant agent who haunted, rather than inhabited our home, without some additional proofs alike of his malice and his power.

My poor wife’s presentiments were still more terrible and overpowering, though not more defined, than my own.  She was never tranquil while our little girl was out of her sight; always dreading and expecting some new revelation of the evil influence which, as we were indeed both persuaded, had bereft our darling little boy of life.  Against an hostility so unearthly and intangible there was no guarding, and the sense of helplessness intensified the misery of our situation.  Tormented with doubts of the very basis of her religion, and recoiling from the ordeal of prayer with the strange horror with which the victim of hydrophobia repels the pure water, she no longer found the consolation which, had sorrow reached her in any other shape, she would have drawn from the healing influence of religion.  We were both of us unhappy, dismayed, DEMON-STRICKEN.