re in the room at the time, and it
struck me that one of them--the one who was there for her second
winter--looked a little surprised and interested; but the matron passed
off the subject with a few bantering words, and again I had no suspicion
of the truth.

Six weeks passed, and my last night in the house had arrived. My nurse
friend was in the habit of giving me massage twice a day, before getting
up in the morning and the last thing at night. She left me on this
occasion about ten-thirty P.M., expressing a hope that I should soon
sleep, and have a good night before my long journey next day.

"Not much doubt of that," I murmured. "Why, I'm half asleep already!"
And I turned round, tired and yet soothed by the massage, and soon fell
into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Several hours must have passed, when I woke up, trembling and
terror-struck, after passing through an experience which seems as vivid
to me to-day as on that February night or early morning. My heart was
beating, my limbs trembling, beads of perspiration covered my face, as I
discovered later.

No wonder! I had been through an experience from which few, I imagine,
return to tell the tale. For I had passed through every detail of dying,
and dying a very hard and difficult death.

Body and soul were being literally _torn apart_, in spite of the
desperate effort to cling together, and my spirit seemed to be launched
into unknown depths of darkness and possible horror. It was the feeling
that _I did not know where I was going nor what awaited me_ that seemed
so terrible--this and the horrible fight for mastery between my poor
body and soul and some unknown force that was inexorably set upon
dividing them.

This, so far as I can express it, exactly describes the experience I had
just gone through, and from which I had awakened in such abject terror.

As the beating of my heart subsided, and I could think more calmly, I
remembered with startling distinctness that in the very worst of the
struggle I had been vainly endeavouring to say that text in the
twenty-third Psalm which begins:

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no
evil; for Thou art with me: _Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me._" I
could say the first part of it quite easily, but some fiendish enemy
seemed bent upon preventing my saying the last sentence, and in my
terrible dream, rescue and safety depended upon my getting to the end of
the text. I tried ag