him with
his hands, like a man restored from death--there stood Henry Jekyll!
What he told me in the next hour I cannot bring my mind to set on paper.
I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and
yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I
believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep
has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and
night; I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I
shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to
me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it
without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that
(if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The
creature who crept into my house that night was, on Jekyll's own
confession, known by the name of Hyde, and hunted for in every corner of
the land as the murderer of Carew.
HASTIE LANYON.
HENRY JEKYLL'S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE
I was born in the year 18-- to a large fortune, endowed besides with
excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of
the wise and good among my fellow-men, and thus, as might have been
supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished
future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety
of disposition such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I
found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head
high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public.
Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I
reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock
of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a
profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such
irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had
set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of
shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any
particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with
even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those
provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's dual nature.
In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that
hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the
most plentifu
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