nward.

It was indeed he. He was half-reclining, half-standing against a wall
of the chamber: that he was not dead, I at once knew by his uneasy
breathing. Indeed, when, having chafed his hands for some time, I tried
to rouse him, he quickly recovered himself, and muttered: 'I fainted; I
want sleep--only sleep.' I bore him back to the lighted room, assisted
by Ham in the latter part of the journey. Ham's ecstasies were
infinite; he had hardly hoped to see his master's face again. His
garments being wet and soiled, the negro divested him of them, and
dressed him in a tightly-fitting scarlet robe of Babylonish pattern,
reaching to the feet, but leaving the lower neck and forearm bare, and
girt round the stomach by a broad gold-orphreyed _ceinture_. With all
the tenderness of a woman, the man stretched his master thus arrayed on
the couch. Here he kept an Argus guard while Zaleski, in one deep
unbroken slumber of a night and a day, reposed before him. When at last
the sleeper woke, in his eye,--full of divine instinct,--flitted the
wonted falchion-flash of the whetted, two-edged intellect; the secret,
austere, self-conscious smile of triumph curved his lip; not a trace of
pain or fatigue remained. After a substantial meal on nuts, autumn
fruits, and wine of Samos, he resumed his place on the couch; and I sat
by his side to hear the story of his wandering. He said:

'We have, Shiel, had before us a very remarkable series of murders, and
a very remarkable series of suicides. Were they in any way connected?
To this extent, I think--that the mysterious, the unparalleled nature
of the murders gave rise to a morbid condition in the public mind,
which in turn resulted in the epidemic of suicide. But though such an
epidemic has its origin in the instinct of imitation so common in men,
you must not suppose that the mental process is a _conscious_ one. A
person feels an impulse to go and do, and is not aware that at bottom
it is only an impulse to go and do _likewise_. He would indeed
repudiate such an assumption. Thus one man destroys himself, and
another imitates him--but whereas the former uses a pistol, the latter
uses a rope. It is rather absurd, therefore, to imagine that in any of
those cases in which the slip of papyrus has been found in the mouth
after death, the cause of death has been the slavish imitativeness of
the suicidal mania,--for this, as I say, is never _slavish._ The
papyrus then--quite apart from the unmistaka