ottered, my whole spirit became
possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for
breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were
these--these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they
were his, but I shook as if with a fit of the ague in fancying they
were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I
gazed;--while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts.
Not thus he appeared--assuredly not thus--in the vivacity of his waking
hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of
arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation
of my gait, my voice, my habits, and my manner! Was it, in truth, within
the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result,
merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?
Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I extinguished the lamp,
passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the halls of that
old academy, never to enter them again.

After a lapse of some months, spent at home in mere idleness, I found
myself a student at Eton. The brief interval had been sufficient to
enfeeble my remembrance of the events at Dr. Bransby's, or at least
to effect a material change in the nature of the feelings with which
I remembered them. The truth--the tragedy--of the drama was no more.
I could now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses; and seldom
called up the subject at all but with wonder at extent of human
credulity, and a smile at the vivid force of the imagination which I
hereditarily possessed. Neither was this species of scepticism likely to
be diminished by the character of the life I led at Eton. The vortex of
thoughtless folly into which I there so immediately and so recklessly
plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past hours, engulfed at
once every solid or serious impression, and left to memory only the
veriest levities of a former existence.

I do not wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy
here--a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded
the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without
profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat
unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless
dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a
secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of th