the smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me
than all the flowers that grow out of it. There's no anodyne like your
good clean gravel, Sir. But if you can keep me about awhile, and it
amuses you to try, you may show your skill upon me, if you like. There
is a pleasure or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night
is not far off, at best.--I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me,
and come, if you like, in the morning.

Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment. The
beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often do, with
a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes. The drapery fluttered on
the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the window;--a crack
of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind stirred the hanging
folds. In my excited state, I seemed to see something ominous in that
arm pointing to the heavens. I thought of the figures in the Dance of
Death at Basle, and that other on the panels of the covered Bridge at
Lucerne, and it seemed to me that the grim mask who mingles with every
crowd and glides over every threshold was pointing the sick man to his
far home, and would soon stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag
him on the unmeasured journey towards it.

The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
entered the chamber. The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
these two objects. They were enough. The house was deadly still, and the
night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as from a field of
ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking corridor. As I turned into
the common passage, a white figure, holding a lamp, stood full before
me. I thought at first it was one of those images made to stand in
niches and hold a light in their hands. But the illusion was momentary,
and my eyes speedily recovered from the shock of the bright flame and
snowy drapery to see that the figure was a breathing one. It was Iris,
in one of her statue-trances. She had come down, whether sleeping or
waking, I knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was
wanted,--or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our
movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant that there
was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand. I sometimes think women
have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom they cannot see
or hear, are in suffering. How surely we find them at the bedsid