drop in the
sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A
change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it
was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon's
condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came
home to my own house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration of
the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the
nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning
shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of
the brute that slept within me, and I had not, of course, forgotten the
appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my
own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so
strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.

I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the
chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those
indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the
time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging
and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a
double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat
looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be
re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great
effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the
drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of
the day and night I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above
all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always
as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending
doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even
beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a
creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and
mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.
But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would
leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew
daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images
of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed
not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of
Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyl