There is a very plain line of demarcation between the legitimate spirit of inquiry and mere apish curiosity.  I could recognise it, I have no doubt, as a rule, yet in my then mood, under the influence of a kind of morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat.  I could not whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-o’-the-wisp; and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and mire, until it fell into a state of collapse, and was useful for nothing else.

I went to bed and to sleep without difficulty, but I was conscious of myself all the time, and of a shadowless horror that seemed to come stealthily out of corners and to bend over and look at me, and to be nothing but a curtain or a hanging coat when I started and stared.

Over and over again this happened, and my temperature rose by leaps, and suddenly I saw that if I failed to assert myself, and promptly, fever would lap me in a consuming fire.  Then in a moment I broke into a profuse perspiration, and sank exhausted into delicious unconsciousness.

Morning found me restored to vigour, but still with the maggot of curiosity boring in my brain.  It worked there all day, and for many subsequent days, and at last it seemed as if my every faculty were honeycombed with its ramifications.  Then “this will not do”, I thought, but still the tunnelling process went on.

At first I would not acknowledge to myself what all this mental to-do was about.  I was ashamed of my new development, in fact, and nervous, too, in a degree of what it might reveal in the matter of moral degeneration; but gradually, as the curious devil mastered me, I grew into such harmony with it that I could shut my eyes no longer to the true purpose of its insistence.  It was the closed cell about which my thoughts hovered like crows circling round carrion.

* * * * *

“In the dead waste and middle” of a certain night I awoke with a strange, quick recovery of consciousness.  There was the passing of a single expiration, and I had been asleep and was awake.  I had gone to bed with no sense of premonition or of resolve in a particular direction; I sat up a monomaniac.  It was as if, swelling in the silent hours, the tumour of curiosity had come to a head, and in a moment it was necessary to operate upon it.

I make no excuse for my then condition.  I am convinced I was the victim of some undistinguishable force, that I was an agent under the control of the supernatural, if you like.  Some thought had been in my mind of late that in my position it was my duty to unriddle the mystery of the closed cell.  This was a sop timidly held out to and rejected by my better reason.  I sought—­and I knew it in my heart—­solution of the puzzle, because it was a puzzle with an atmosphere that vitiated my moral fibre.  Now, suddenly, I knew I must act, or, by forcing self-control, imperil my mind’s stability.