that sublimation of folly has palled upon my soul.  All this is now the fitter for my purpose.  Like these arabesque censers, my spirit is writhing in fire, and the delirium of this scene is fashioning me for the wilder visions of that land of real dreams whither I am now rapidly departing.”  He here paused abruptly, bent his head to his bosom, and seemed to listen to a sound which I could not hear.  At length, erecting his frame, he looked upwards, and ejaculated the lines of the Bishop of Chichester: 

     "Stay for me there!  I will not fail
     To meet thee in that hollow vale."

In the next instant, confessing the power of the wine, he threw himself at full-length upon an ottoman.

A quick step was now heard upon the staircase, and a loud knock at the door rapidly succeeded.  I was hastening to anticipate a second disturbance, when a page of Mentoni’s household burst into the room, and faltered out, in a voice choking with emotion, the incoherent words, “My mistress! — my mistress! — Poisoned! — poisoned!  Oh, beautiful — oh, beautiful Aphrodite!”

Bewildered, I flew to the ottoman, and endeavored to arouse the sleeper to a sense of the startling intelligence.  But his limbs were rigid — his lips were livid — his lately beaming eyes were riveted in death.  I staggered back towards the table — my hand fell upon a cracked and blackened goblet — and a consciousness of the entire and terrible truth flashed suddenly over my soul.

~~~ End of Text ~~~

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THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores
Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit. 
Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.

[Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris.]

I WAS sick —­ sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.  The sentence —­ the dread sentence of death —­ was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.  After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum.  It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution —­ perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel.  This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more.  Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration!  I saw the lips of the black-robed judges.  They appeared to me white —­ whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words —­ and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness —­ of immoveable resolution —­ of stern contempt of human torture.  I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate, were still issuing from those lips.  I saw them writhe with a deadly locution.  I saw them fashion the