Then, overwhelmed with horror, I set off to run to the village, shouting:  “Help! help! fire! fire!” I met some people who were already coming onto the scene, and I went back with them to see!

By this time the house was nothing but a horrible and magnificent funeral pile, a monstrous funeral pile which lit up the whole country, a funeral pile where men were burning, and where he was burning also, He, He, my prisoner, that new Being, the new master, the Horla!

Suddenly the whole roof fell in between the walls, and a volcano of flames darted up to the sky.  Through all the windows which opened onto that furnace I saw the flames darting, and I thought that he was there, in that kiln, dead.

Dead? perhaps?...  His body?  Was not his body, which was transparent, indestructible by such means as would kill ours?

If he was not dead?...  Perhaps time alone has power over that Invisible and Redoubtable Being.  Why this transparent, unrecognizable body, this body belonging to a spirit, if it also had to fear ills, infirmities and premature destruction?

Premature destruction?  All human terror springs from that!  After man the Horla.  After him who can die every day, at any hour, at any moment, by any accident, he came who was only to die at his own proper hour and minute, because he had touched the limits of his existence!

No ... no ... without any doubt ... he is not dead.  Then ... then ...  I suppose I must kill myself!

FOOTNOTE.—­This story is a tragic experience and prophecy.  It was insanity that robbed the world of its most finished short story writer, the author of this tale; and even before his madness became overpowering, de Maupassant complained that he was haunted by his double—­by a vision of another Self confronting and threatening him.  He had run life at its top speed; this hallucination was the result.

Medical science defines in such cases “an image of memory which differs in intensity from the normal”—­that is to say, a fixed idea so persistent and growing that to the thinker it seems utterly real.

    —­EDITOR.

PIERRE MILLE

The Miracle of Zobeide

Always wise and prudent, Zobeide cautiously put aside the myrtle branches and peeped through to see who were the persons talking by the fountain in the cool shadow of the pink sandstone wall.  And when she saw that it was only the Rev. John Feathercock, her lord and master, discoursing as usual with Mohammed-si-Koualdia, she went toward them frankly but slowly.

When she was quite near she stopped, and from the light that played in her deep black eyes you would have thought that surely she was listening with the deepest attention.  But the truth is that with all her little brain, with all her mouth, and with all her stomach, she was craving the yellow and odorous pulp of a melon which had been cut open and put on the table near two tall glasses half filled with snowy sherbet.  For Zobeide was a turtle of the ordinary kind found in the grass of all the meadows around the city of Damascus.