ing in thought, or word, or deed.

He returned to the inn and closed the window without fearing to make
a noise, and went to bed at once. His moral and physical lassitude was
certain to bring him sleep. In a very short time after laying his head
on his mattress, he fell into that first fantastic somnolence which
precedes the deepest sleep. The senses then grew numb, and life is
abolished by degrees; thoughts are incomplete, and the last quivering of
our consciousness seems like a sort of reverie. "How heavy the air is!"
he thought; "I seem to be breathing a moist vapor." He explained this
vaguely to himself by the difference which must exist between the
atmosphere of the close room and the purer air by the river. But
presently he heard a periodical noise, something like that made by drops
of water falling from a robinet into a fountain. Obeying a feeling
of panic terror he was about to rise and call the innkeeper and waken
Wahlenfer and Wilhelm, but he suddenly remembered, alas! to his great
misfortune, the tall wooden clock; he fancied the sound was that of
the pendulum, and he fell asleep with that confused and indistinct
perception.

["Do you want some water, Monsieur Taillefer?" said the master of the
house, observing that the banker was mechanically pouring from an empty
decanter.

Monsieur Hermann continued his narrative after the slight pause
occasioned by this interruption.]

The next morning Prosper Magnan was awakened by a great noise. He seemed
to hear piercing cries, and he felt that violent shuddering of the
nerves which we suffer when on awaking we continue to feel a painful
impression begun in sleep. A physiological fact then takes place
within us, a start, to use the common expression, which has never been
sufficiently observed, though it contains very curious phenomena for
science. This terrible agony, produced, possibly, by the too sudden
reunion of our two natures separated during sleep, is usually transient;
but in the poor young surgeon's case it lasted, and even increased,
causing him suddenly the most awful horror as he beheld a pool of
blood between Wahlenfer's bed and his own mattress. The head of the
unfortunate German lay on the ground; his body was still on the bed; all
its blood had flowed out by the neck.

Seeing the eyes still open but fixed, seeing the blood which had stained
his sheets and even his hands, recognizing his own surgical instrument
beside him, Prosper Magnan fainted an