muscle, every
faculty, on that never-to-be-forgotten night of bitter, freezing cold,
and driving sleet and blast, which seemed to proclaim itself, in every
howling gust, "The wind Euroclydon!"

CHAPTER XIII.

At first, excitement and terror winged my feet; but even these refused,
after I had gone a few squares, to do their friendly office.

Bareheaded, but for a filmy veil, soon thoroughly drenched through;
barehanded and almost barefooted, for my thin silk slippers and
stockings formed not, after my first few steps, the slightest impediment
to wet or cold, I felt that I must perish by the wayside. The sleety
storm drove sharply in my face, rendered doubly sensitive to its rigor
by long absence from outward air. My insufficient clothing clung closely
about me, freezing in every fold, and I glided rather than walked along
the icy pavement, scarcely lifting my stiffened feet, or having power to
do so.

One stern hope--it almost seemed a forlorn one--now possessed me to the
exclusion of all else; one prayer trembled on my quivering lips--that I
might reach my destination, if only to tell my story and drop dead a
moment after.

Yet I think, in spite of this resolve--this prayer--that, had a friendly
door been opened on the way, an area even emitting light and warmth, I
should have instinctively turned aside and, at any risk, pleaded for
shelter, both from storm and foeman.

In those days that seem far back in the march of luxury, because of the
vast impetus of human momentum, stores were closed early, and the
primitive family tea-table still existed which marked the assemblage of
the household around the evening lamp and hearth.

I remember the closed, inhospitable look of the houses past which I
sped--the solid wooden shutters, then universal, which closed from the
wayfarer every evidence of internal life, and the cold sheen of the
icy-white marble steps, made visible by dim lamp-light.

I gained a street-corner not very far, as it seemed to me, from my place
of destination. Yet, until I glanced across the way, I was uncertain,
and, but for the friendly refuge this opportunity presented, I think I
must have faltered and perhaps fallen and frozen to death on the
road-side.

To my bewildered and disordered brain, Aladdin's palace seemed suddenly
to rise before me in that wilderness of sealed houses and uninhabited
streets; for, as I have said before, the very dogs had crept away that
night into secure cor