the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down
on the substance selected for compression. The frightful apparatus moved
without making the faintest noise. There had been no creaking as it came
down; there was now not the faintest sound from the room above. Amid a
dead and awful silence I beheld before me--in the nineteenth century,
and in the civilized capital of France--such a machine for secret
murder by suffocation as might have existed in the worst days of the
Inquisition, in the lonely inns among the Hartz Mountains, in the
mysterious tribunals of Westphalia! Still, as I looked on it, I could
not move, I could hardly breathe, but I began to recover the power of
thinking, and in a moment I discovered the murderous conspiracy framed
against me in all its horror.

My cup of coffee had been drugged, and drugged too strongly. I had been
saved from being smothered by having taken an overdose of some narcotic.
How I had chafed and fretted at the fever fit which had preserved my
life by keeping me awake! How recklessly I had confided myself to the
two wretches who had led me into this room, determined, for the sake
of my winnings, to kill me in my sleep by the surest and most horrible
contrivance for secretly accomplishing my destruction! How many men,
winners like me, had slept, as I had proposed to sleep, in that bed, and
had never been seen or heard of more! I shuddered at the bare idea of
it.

But, ere long, all thought was again suspended by the sight of the
murderous canopy moving once more. After it had remained on the bed--as
nearly as I could guess--about ten minutes, it began to move up again.
The villains who worked it from above evidently believed that their
purpose was now accomplished. Slowly and silently, as it had descended,
that horrible bed-top rose towards its former place. When it reached
the upper extremities of the four posts, it reached the ceiling, too.
Neither hole nor screw could be seen; the bed became in appearance an
ordinary bed again--the canopy an ordinary canopy--even to the most
suspicious eyes.

Now, for the first time, I was able to move--to rise from my knees--to
dress myself in my upper clothing--and to consider of how I should
escape. If I betrayed by the smallest noise that the attempt to
suffocate me had failed, I was certain to be murdered. Had I made any
noise already? I listened intently, looking towards the door.

No! no footsteps in the passage outside--no sound of a