LAST GLEANINGS.

I.

B

FROM THE SICK CHAMBER.

KNEW IT WAS COMING. For days

ever since the trifling accident which I

so foolishly neglected-the Shadow had kept very close behind me, and when it at length tripped me up, stared at me with its ghostly eyes, and laid its icy finger on my heart, I only muttered 'God help me!' and took to my bed. in peace.

There were three eras in my illness. These-if I have the strength-I am now, in the early hours of my convalescence, going to describe. You ask why? Do you remember the old Italian legend of the murderer who, being always haunted by a ghost, at length conceived the notion of painting it, thinking that by thus familiarizing himself with

A

the spectre as a work of art, its awful potency as a real Presence would be over? Thus write I the history of my late sickness: Death has been driven from my chamber, but there is a long dark shaft of Deathly Memory streaming through the door (as though the Shade, with scythe scarce lowered, still lurked without), and this caput mortuum of disease, I would now dissolve and dissipate.

The first stage may be called the Era of Pain. Then was my body given over to the Furies, who bound my limbs with withes of livid steel, and with their long lank fingers scooped icy channels round my heart. Then did Despair sit upon my shoulder with his thin white lips closeset and his lean arms folded ruefully together. A low plaintive echo of a refrain came through his lips perfunctorily, and was caught up with multitudinous roar by the million tiny fiends of torture that chased each other through my brain. 'Forasmuch,' murmured, or seemed to murmur the Demon of Despair,- Forasmuch,' took up in choral strain the fiends that had o'erthrown my reason and held it in subjection-'Forasmuch,' swelled one loud ringing cry, as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto

Himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!' I was already dead; but for a time that seemed ten thousand years-ten thousand years during which I daily watched the sun uprise and nightly saw it set-this cry went on. A very cold and clod-like termination had the song: the words fell on my heart as dust upon à coffin and made the same dull, dead response, Ten Thousand Years! It was a long, long, weary, weary while. I sickened at the white-faced moons that century after century stared down at me-no pity in their cold bright looks, no ray of sympathy with the Dead-Alive in the immortal eyes of their attendant stars. In time the patterns of the sky had grown terribly familiar to me. I had lived-been dead-alive-long years enough to have seen the cloud-forms repeat themselves so often that the 'tiresome roof of heaven' was as offensive in my sight as the paper of his chamber is to a bedridden and sleepless man. I watched Titanic mountains waste gradually away; saw the sea break through its antique boundaries and change its bed; and marked new races of men and beasts brought forth upon the earth. Nay, I saw the

very stars burn out and drop from heaven like withered blossoms! Through all this awful time Pain was my master. He was implacable, and used me as he listed. Sometimes I was as cold as an old-world mummy in its stony tomb far down beneath the slimy channel of the Nile: at others I seemed to be standing in a fiery furnace until my body so glowed and gleamed that I was fain to close my eyes to shut out its arrowy rays of blasting light. But the greatest burden of all to bear was the facetious ferocity of the fiends that had o'erthrown my reason. They-Pain's pigmy ministers-played leap-frog on my temples. They hustled each other against the lurid balls of my eyes until sparks flew out as from a bar of iron beneath the hammer of the smith. Anon they'd drop or part of them would drop-their Sacred Song, and, grinning, raise some impious shout that crossed the other in dark lines of discord that seemed to scorch themselves upon my brain. With leering eyes they made foul beck and sign to one another, and then with rapid utterance jumbled profane and holy things in such a hideous and mocking medley that I shrieked and shrieked aloud and dug my fingers in my ears to deaden the devilish chorus and drown the demon crew.

In time when the ten thousand years had in slow, steady, and sequential course expired-when the last cold moon had dipped behind the marble heavens-I, God be praised! succeeded in gaining peace. Reason was again triumphant, and, with tottering step and slow, once more took possession of her throne. The first stage of my suffering was over, and the doctor ceased to surfeit me with opium.

The Era of the Eyes came next. It did not last long, but was very terrible. My room-for I had awakened to reality sufficiently to know I was in a room and to recognise the Wife, Brother, and Doctor at my side-was everywhere full of eyes, single eyes of a most strangely real expression. I never remember to have taken special notice of my friends' eyes. I might be able at a guess, perhaps, to say whose are fair and whose dark, whose large and whose small. I could certainly say no more. When I partly recovered my senses, however, and the room seemed (as I said) full of eyes whenever I closed my own, each one of the hundreds that I saw took distinct shape, form, colour, and expression; so that, of my own accord, I could pick out any eye and tell to whose face of all the men's