nths after the crime, I had a terrible
nightmare. I seemed to see the horrible hand running over my curtains and
walls like an immense scorpion or spider. Three times I awoke, three
times I went to sleep again; three times I saw the hideous object
galloping round my room and moving its fingers like legs.

"The following day the hand was brought me, found in the cemetery, on the
grave of Sir John Rowell, who had been buried there because we had been
unable to find his family. The first finger was missing.

"Ladies, there is my story. I know nothing more."

The women, deeply stirred, were pale and trembling. One of them
exclaimed:

"But that is neither a climax nor an explanation! We will be unable to
sleep unless you give us your opinion of what had occurred."

The judge smiled severely:

"Oh! Ladies, I shall certainly spoil your terrible dreams. I simply
believe that the legitimate owner of the hand was not dead, that he came
to get it with his remaining one. But I don't know how. It was a kind of
vendetta."

One of the women murmured:

"No, it can't be that."

And the judge, still smiling, said:

"Didn't I tell you that my explanation would not satisfy you?"

A TRESS OF HAIR

The walls of the cell were bare and white washed. A narrow grated window,
placed so high that one could not reach it, lighted this sinister little
room. The mad inmate, seated on a straw chair, looked at us with a fixed,
vacant and haunted expression. He was very thin, with hollow cheeks and
hair almost white, which one guessed might have turned gray in a few
months. His clothes appeared to be too large for his shrunken limbs, his
sunken chest and empty paunch. One felt that this man's mind was
destroyed, eaten by his thoughts, by one thought, just as a fruit is
eaten by a worm. His craze, his idea was there in his brain, insistent,
harassing, destructive. It wasted his frame little by little.
It--the invisible, impalpable, intangible, immaterial idea--was
mining his health, drinking his blood, snuffing out his life.

What a mystery was this man, being killed by an ideal! He aroused sorrow,
fear and pity, this madman. What strange, tremendous and deadly thoughts
dwelt within this forehead which they creased with deep wrinkles which
were never still?

"He has terrible attacks of rage," said the doctor to me. "His is one of
the most peculiar cases I have ever seen. He has seizures of erotic and
macaberesque madness. He is a s