cell, I am almost ashamed to own--that the terror
and horror with which the animal inspired me had been heightened by one
of the merest chimeras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had
called my attention more than once to the character of the mark of white
hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible
difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The
reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally
very indefinite, but by slow degrees--degrees nearly imperceptible, and
which for a long time my reason struggled to reject as fanciful--it had
at length assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the
representation of an object that I shudder to name--and for this above
all I loathed and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster _had
I dared_--it was now, I say, the image of a hideous--of a ghastly
thing--of the GALLOWS!--O, mournful and terrible engine of horror and of
crime--of agony and of death!

And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere humanity.
And _a brute beast_--whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed--_a
brute beast_ to work out for _me_--for me a man, fashioned in the image
of the High God--so much of insufferable woe! Alas! neither by day nor
by night knew I the blessing of rest any more! During the former the
creature left me no moment alone; and in the latter I started hourly
from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of _the thing_
upon my face, and its vast weight--an incarnate nightmare that I had no
power to shake off--incumbent eternally upon my _heart_!

Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of
the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole
intimates--the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my
usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while
from the sudden frequent and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I
now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most
usual and the most patient of sufferers.

One day she accompanied me upon some household errand into the cellar of
the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat
followed me down the steep stairs, and nearly throwing me headlong,
exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an ax, and forgetting in my wrath
the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at
the animal, which of cou