He pointed to garments; — they were muddy and clotted with gore.  I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand:  it was indented with the impress of human nails.  He directed my attention to some object against the wall.  I looked at it for some minutes:  it was a spade.  With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it.  But I could not force it open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

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ELEONORA

Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima.

_ Raymond Lully_ .

I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion.  Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence —­ whether much that is glorious- whether all that is profound —­ does not spring from disease of thought —­ from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.  They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.  In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awakening, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret.  In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil.  They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the “light ineffable,” and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, “agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi.”

We will say, then, that I am mad.  I grant, at least, that there are two distinct conditions of my mental existence —­ the condition of a lucid reason, not to be disputed, and belonging to the memory of events forming the first epoch of my life —­ and a condition of shadow and doubt, appertaining to the present, and to the recollection of what constitutes the second great era of my being.  Therefore, what I shall tell of the earlier period, believe; and to what I may relate of the later time, give only such credit as may seem due, or doubt it altogether, or, if doubt it ye cannot, then play unto its riddle the Oedipus.

She whom I loved in youth, and of whom I now pen calmly and distinctly these remembrances, was the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long departed.  Eleonora was the name of my cousin.  We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.  No unguided footstep ever came upon that vale; for it lay away up among a range of giant hills that hung beetling around about it, shutting out the sunlight from its sweetest recesses.  No path was trodden in its vicinity; and, to reach our happy home, there was need of putting back, with force, the foliage of many thousands of forest trees, and of crushing to death the glories of many millions of fragrant flowers.  Thus it was that we lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley —­ I, and my cousin, and her mother.