hour the stillness of death. All slept, and in such hush, it seemed
that none dreamed. Stretched on the nineteen beds lay nineteen forms,
at full-length and motionless. On mine--the twentieth couch--nothing
_ought_ to have lain: I had left it void, and void should have found
it. What, then; do I see between the half-drawn curtains? What dark,
usurping shape, supine, long, and strange? Is it a robber who has made
his way through the open street-door, and lies there in wait? It looks
very black, I think it looks--not human. Can it be a wandering dog that
has come in from the street and crept and nestled hither? Will it
spring, will it leap out if I approach? Approach I must. Courage! One
step!--

My head reeled, for by the faint night-lamp, I saw stretched on my bed
the old phantom--the NUN.

A cry at this moment might have ruined me. Be the spectacle what it
might, I could afford neither consternation, scream, nor swoon.
Besides, I was not overcome. Tempered by late incidents, my nerves
disdained hysteria. Warm from illuminations, and music, and thronging
thousands, thoroughly lashed up by a new scourge, I defied spectra. In
a moment, without exclamation, I had rushed on the haunted couch;
nothing leaped out, or sprung, or stirred; all the movement was mine,
so was all the life, the reality, the substance, the force; as my
instinct felt. I tore her up--the incubus! I held her on high--the
goblin! I shook her loose--the mystery! And down she fell--down all
around me--down in shreds and fragments--and I trode upon her.

Here again--behold the branchless tree, the unstabled Rosinante; the
film of cloud, the flicker of moonshine. The long nun proved a long
bolster dressed in a long black stole, and artfully invested with a
white veil. The garments in very truth, strange as it may seem, were
genuine nun's garments, and by some hand they had been disposed with a
view to illusion. Whence came these vestments? Who contrived this
artifice? These questions still remained. To the head-bandage was
pinned a slip of paper: it bore in pencil these mocking words--

"The nun of the attic bequeaths to Lucy Snowe her wardrobe. She will be
seen in the Rue Fossette no more."

And what and who was she that had haunted me? She, I had actually seen
three times. Not a woman of my acquaintance had the stature of that
ghost. She was not of a female height. Not to any man I knew could the
machination, for a moment, be attributed.

Still my