que shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen
eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless
neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which
burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished
the two candles which stood on a table at the right side.

Then he got in the bed and stretched out his arms, one aloft, the other
behind him, finding with the fingers of this hand the turncock of the
gas burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goose-necked
iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which
controlled the battery of electric lights round about, and with a
long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and
electricity simultaneously and sank his head toward the pillow.

The paeaned sigh turned to a shriek of mortal terror. Quaking in every
limb, crying out in a continuous frenzy of fright, he was up again on
his knees seeking with quivering hands for the switch; pawing about then
for matches with which to relight the gas. For the blackness--that
blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life--had
come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its
terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers,
gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.

That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless
craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil.
He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a
friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.

For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves,
punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were
nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his
body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of
this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater
than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted
and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and
soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for
which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out
unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the
one thing nor the other.

Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all
out, and presently he found