he canal in
time. We made a gay parting for him, but when the boat started, and I
was gloating on the three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking
trot, under the snaky spirals of the driver's smacking whip-lash, I
caught sight of my uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad
smile of his. My aunt was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned
away she put it to her eyes.

"The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end,
from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle's report
afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to
stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would
have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not
analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but
simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements
were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the
cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and
chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making
acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded
that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers
without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not
only steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the
effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow
it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so
tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain
away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other
things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him
was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to
abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a
while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain
to escape from it.

"He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite
delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had
none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something
dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no
part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the
two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take
the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the
relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the star