“‘Heraine, I will do it!’

“In a month I set out for my travels.  An easy coach conveyed me to London, and the third day I lay sick in Paris.  Sore of body and brain, strained in nerve and stunned in sense, I persisted in my resolve, and was whirled, more dead than alive, across the Continent to Berlin.  In the period of three months I had traversed all the leading kingdoms and pushed my purpose to the sandy banks of the Nile.  Every moment in this journey was an infinity of torture; but in the bitterest pangs I remembered the divine consummation, and kept on.  My infirmities were increased rather than diminished.  In the deepest thunder I could hear the delving of the beetle; and though the whole vault blazed with electric light, I could see the twinkle of the glow-worm.  But among the multitude of noises which haunted me, the most persistent were the footfalls of men.  There were pauses in the lives of all other beings.  The weasel and the hyena rested sometimes, and I could avoid their haunts, but men were forever alert and ubiquitous.  I heard them in abysses, upon peaks, and in wildernesses.  They trod upon my nerves; they crushed sleep from my soul.  I closed my ears in vain; I fled without refuge; I prayed without avail.  The patter of little children, the footfall of the maiden, the elastic pace of the youth, the racking limp of the cripple, the veteran hobbling upon his wooden stump, the confused tread of crowds, the steady tramp of soldiers—­these tortured me by daylight, and I kept penance at midnight with the going of outcasts and vagrants.

“I learned to classify these footfalls.  My sensations of them were so keen that my memory retained them.  I recognized individuals, not by their faces but by their feet.  A solitary tourist met me among the ruins of Luxor; I knew his tread, though months had elapsed, among the thousands on London Bridge.  A gypsy family, whom I passed on the Spanish sierras, went under my window in Paris, and I missed the feet of the lad who had been hanged.  Ten thieves were marched to the pillory in Kiev; I counted the paces of the four who escaped, from a closed diligence on the Simplon.  I lost not one among the millions of footfalls.  But there were two which I distinguished every where.  When I pursued, they retreated; when I fled, they followed me.  They were like two echoes in different keys; and one of them I loved, the other I hated.  The first was soft, tinkling, harmonious, like a memory rather than a sound; the other was firm, vigorous, and vehement, and it kept time with the soft footstep, as if to drown it to my ears.  When I was fagged and wretched, the light footfall approached me; but when, inspirited, I rose to behold its owner, it died away in the thunder of its companion tread.

“At last I embarked for America, and when the land disappeared I said to myself, ‘At sea, at least, no footfalls can follow.’  But one night, when the clangor of the screw drove me upon deck, I heard, far astern, through the deep fog, the sound of two haunting feet.  Next morning a swifter steamer overtook us.  The waves revelled between, and the winds were high, but above the bellow of our engines and the elements, those thrilling footfalls rang out.  I caught a glimpse of a familiar something, as the rival craft went by, and reeled and fell upon the deck.