o suffer intense pain. Her features
contracted, and she even writhed, as if with some internal agony. The
wondrous forests appeared also to have lost half their beauty. Their
hues were dim and in some places faded away altogether. I watched
Animula for hours with a breaking heart, and she seemed absolutely to
wither away under my very eye. Suddenly I remembered that I had not
looked at the water-drop for several days. In fact, I hated to see it;
for it reminded me of the natural barrier between Animula and myself. I
hurriedly looked down on the stage of the microscope. The slide was
still there,--but, great heavens! the water-drop had vanished! The
awful truth burst upon me; it had evaporated; until it had become so
minute as to be invisible to the naked eye; I had been gazing on its
last atom, the one that contained Animula,--and she was dying!

I rushed again to the front of the lens, and looked through. Alas! the
last agony had seized her. The rainbow-hued forests had all melted
away, and Animula lay struggling feebly in what seemed to be a spot of
dim light. Ah! the sight was horrible; the limbs once so round and
lovely shrivelling up into nothings; the eyes,--those eyes that shone
like heaven--being quenched into black dust; the lustrous golden hair
now lank and discoloured. The last throe came. I beheld that final
struggle of the blackening form--and I fainted.

When I awoke out of a trance of many hours, I found myself lying amid
the wreck of my instrument, myself as shattered in mind and body as it.
I crawled feebly to my bed, from which I did not rise for months.

They say now that I am mad; but they are mistaken. I am poor, for I
have neither the heart nor the will to work; all my money is spent, and
I live on charity. Young men's associations that love a joke invite me
to lecture on Optics before them, for which they pay me and laugh at me
while I lecture. "Linley, the mad microscopist," is the name I go by. I
suppose that I talk incoherently while I lecture. Who could talk sense
when his brain is haunted by such ghastly memories, while ever and anon
among the shapes of death I behold the radiant form of my lost Animula!

III

THE MUMMY'S FOOT

Theophile Gautier

I had entered, in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity
venders who are called _marchands de bric-a-brac_ in that Parisian
_argot_ which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France.

You have doubtless glanced occas