, leaning eagerly across the table, 'I shall be
glad--delighted! Will you take me as your pupil?' My single eye-glass
fell from its position unheeded. 'Take me! Oh, will you take me?' I
cried. Instead of answering, the professor blinked rapidly at me for a
moment. I imagined his eyes had grown bigger, and were assuming a
greenish tinge. The corners of his mouth began to quiver, emitting
queer, caressing little noises, and he rapidly added knot after knot
to his twitching coat-tails. Suddenly he bent forward across the table
until his nose almost touched mine. The pupils of his eyes expanded,
the iris assuming a beautiful, changing, golden-green tinge, and his
coat-tails switched violently. Then he began to mew.

"I strove to rouse myself from my paralysis--I tried to shrink back,
for I felt the end of his cold nose touch mine. I could not move. The
cry of terror died in my straining throat, my hands tightened
convulsively; I was incapable of speech or motion. At the same time my
brain became wonderfully clear. I began to remember everything that
had ever happened to me--everything that I had ever done or said. I
even remembered things that I had neither done nor said; I recalled
distinctly much that had never happened. How fresh and strong my
memory! The past was like a mirror, crystal clear, and there, in
glorious tints and hues, the scenes of my childhood grew and glowed
and faded, and gave place to newer and more splendid scenes. For a
moment the episode of the cat at the Hotel St. Antoine flashed across
my mind. When it vanished a chilly stupor slowly clouded my brain; the
scenes, the memories, the brilliant colors, faded, leaving me
enveloped in a gray vapor, through which the two great eyes of the
professor twinkled with a murky light. A peculiar longing stirred
me--a strange yearning for something, I knew not what--but, oh! how I
longed and yearned for it! Slowly this indefinite, incomprehensible
longing became a living pain. Ah, how I suffered, and how the vapors
seemed to crowd around me! Then, as at a great distance, I heard her
voice, sweet, imperative:

"'Mew!' she said.

"For a moment I seemed to see the interior of my own skull, lighted as
by a flash of fire; the rolling eyeballs, veined in scarlet, the
glistening muscles quivering along the jaw, the humid masses of the
convoluted brain; then awful darkness--a darkness almost tangible--an
utter blackness, through which now seemed to creep a thin, silver