and showed me each familiar object and my little boys asleep
beside me.

Some one says that between the hours of one and four in the morning the
human mind is not itself. I fully believe it. In those hours you do not
"fix your mind" on melancholy subjects--they fix themselves upon you. If
you turn back into the past, there comes up before you every occasion on
which you made a fool of yourself, every lost opportunity, every slight
injury you ever experienced. If you look at the future, you see nothing
but coming failure and disappointment. The present moment connects itself
with every tale you ever heard or read of ghosts, murder, vampires or
robbers.

That night, either because of the wind or because I had taken too strong
coffee, I fell into "the fidgets," as this state of mind is sometimes
called, and selected for immediate cause of discomfort the Panther's
presentiment about the red fox. Who could explain the mysterious way in
which animals are warned of approaching danger? Perhaps the old science of
divination was not so entirely a delusion; and then I remembered all the
old stories in Roman history of people who had come to grief by neglecting
the oracles. The old idea that whatever incident is considered as an omen
will be such in reality, seemed to me at that hour of the night not wholly
an unreasonable theory.

I had known, to be sure, some fifty presentiments which came to nothing,
but then I had known as many as three which had been verified: perhaps the
present case might be one of the exceptions to the rule. Then I remembered
all the stories in Scott's _Demonology_, which I had lately read, and
quite forgot all the arguments intended to disprove them.

[Illustration: The Attack on the "Panther."]

I thought of the broken gun-lock: I thought it not improbable that the
Panther had, when at Ryan's, mentioned that he was coming to our house,
and that it was very likely he had let it appear that he carried his money
with him. Ryan's was one of the worst places in all the State. I
remembered that the money was in the house, and I began to wish, like the
Panther, that I had something to "catch up." Then there were so many
noises about! I heard footsteps, which you will always hear if you listen
for them on a windy night. When our petted old cat jumped from his place
on the parlor sofa to lie down before the fire, I started up in bed in a
sudden fright.

I must have been in this uncomfortable state of mind a