my own fireside, I could not utter it.  I was also rooted to the earth, as if by magic; and although instant tergiversation and flight had my most hearty concurrence, I could not move a limb, nor even raise my eyes off the sepulchral-looking object which lay before me.  I now felt the perspiration fall from my face in torrents, and the strokes of my heart fell audibly on my ear.  I even attempted to say, “God preserve me!” but my tongue was dumb and powerless, and could not move.  My eye was still upon the coffin, when I perceived that, from being motionless, it instantly began to swing,—­first in a lateral, then in a longitudinal direction, although it was perfectly evident that no human hand was nearer it than my own.  At length I raised my eyes off it, for my vision was strained to an aching intensity, which I thought must have occasioned my eye-strings to crack.  I looked instinctively about me for assistance—­but all was dismal, silent, and solitary:  even the moon had disappeared among a few clouds that I had not noticed in the sky.

As I stood in this state of indescribable horror, I saw the light gradually fade away from the tops of the mountains, giving the scene around me a dim and spectral ghastliness, which, to those who were never in such a situation, is altogether inconceivable.

At length I thought I heard a noise as it Were of a rushing tempest, sweeping from the hills down into the valley; but on looking up, I could perceive nothing but the dusky desolation that brooded over the place.  Still the noise continued; again I saw the coffin move; I then felt the motion communicated to myself, and found my body borne and swung backwards and forwards, precisely according to the motion of the coffin.  I again attempted to utter a cry for assistance, but could not:  the motion in my body still continued, as did the approaching noise in the hills.  I looked up a second time in the direction in which the valley wound off between them, but judge of what I must have suffered, when I beheld one of the mountains moving, as it were, from its base, and tumbling down towards the spot on which I stood!  In the twinkling of an eye the whole scene, hills and all, began to tremble, to vibrate, and to fly round me, with a rapid, delirious motion; the stars shot back into the depths of heaven, and disappeared; the ground on which I stood began to pass from beneath my feet; a noise like the breaking of a thousand gigantic billows again burst from every direction, and I found myself instantly overwhelmed by some deadly weight, which prostrated me on the earth, and deprived me of sense and motion.