welcomed the sun with the feeling that
we might never see it rise again.

The nervous terrors and fearful visions which had scared us during the
spring, continued to visit our coward troop during this sad journey. Every
evening brought its fresh creation of spectres; a ghost was depicted by
every blighted tree; and appalling shapes were manufactured from each
shaggy bush. By degrees these common marvels palled on us, and then other
wonders were called into being. Once it was confidently asserted, that the
sun rose an hour later than its seasonable time; again it was discovered
that he grew paler and paler; that shadows took an uncommon appearance. It
was impossible to have imagined, during the usual calm routine of life men
had before experienced, the terrible effects produced by these extravagant
delusions: in truth, of such little worth are our senses, when unsupported
by concurring testimony, that it was with the utmost difficulty I kept
myself free from the belief in supernatural events, to which the major part
of our people readily gave credit. Being one sane amidst a crowd of the
mad, I hardly dared assert to my own mind, that the vast luminary had
undergone no change--that the shadows of night were unthickened by
innumerable shapes of awe and terror; or that the wind, as it sung in the
trees, or whistled round an empty building, was not pregnant with sounds of
wailing and despair. Sometimes realities took ghostly shapes; and it was
impossible for one's blood not to curdle at the perception of an evident
mixture of what we knew to be true, with the visionary semblance of all
that we feared.

Once, at the dusk of the evening, we saw a figure all in white, apparently
of more than human stature, flourishing about the road, now throwing up its
arms, now leaping to an astonishing height in the air, then turning round
several times successively, then raising itself to its full height and
gesticulating violently. Our troop, on the alert to discover and believe in
the supernatural, made a halt at some distance from this shape; and, as it
became darker, there was something appalling even to the incredulous, in
the lonely spectre, whose gambols, if they hardly accorded with spiritual
dignity, were beyond human powers. Now it leapt right up in the air, now
sheer over a high hedge, and was again the moment after in the road before
us. By the time I came up, the fright experienced by the spectators of this
ghostly exhibition,