nces, these reflections were not pleasant. I
wished Tress had not talked that nonsense about the thing being haunted.
It was surely sufficient to know that it was drugged and poisonous,
without anything else.

I replaced it in the sandalwood box. I locked the box in a cabinet. Quite
apart from the question as to whether that pipe was or was not haunted, I
know it haunted me. It was with me in a figurative--which was worse than
actual--sense all the day. Still worse, it was with me all the night. It
was with me in my dreams. Such dreams! Possibly I had not yet wholly
recovered from the effects of that insidious drug, but, whether or no, it
was very wrong of Tress to set my thoughts into such a channel. He knows
that I am of a highly imaginative temperament, and that it is easier to
get morbid thoughts into my mind than to get them out again. Before that
night was through I wished very heartily that I had never seen the pipe! I
woke from one nightmare to fall into another. One dreadful dream was with
me all the time--of a hideous, green reptile which advanced toward me out
of some awful darkness, slowly, inch by inch, until it clutched me round
the neck, and, gluing its lips to mine, sucked the life's blood out of my
veins as it embraced me with a slimy kiss. Such dreams are not restful. I
woke anything but refreshed when the morning came. And when I got up and
dressed I felt that, on the whole, it would perhaps have been better if I
never had gone to bed. My nerves were unstrung, and I had that generally
tremulous feeling which is, I believe, an inseparable companion of the
more advanced stages of dipsomania. I ate no breakfast. I am no breakfast
eater as a rule, but that morning I ate absolutely nothing.

"If this sort of thing is to continue, I will let Tress have his pipe
again. He may have the laugh of me, but anything is better than this."

It was with almost funereal forebodings that I went to the cabinet in
which I had placed the sandalwood box. But when I opened it my feelings of
gloom partially vanished. Of what phantasies had I been guilty! It must
have been an entire delusion on my part to have supposed that those
tentacula had ever been twined about the bowl. The creature was in
exactly the same position in which I had left it the day before--as, of
course, I knew it would be--poised, as if about to spring. I was telling
myself how foolish I had been to allow myself to dwell for a moment on
Tress's words, wh