The bedrooms were wainscoted, but the front one was not gloomy; and in
it the cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its sombre associations. But
the back bedroom, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows,
staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to
be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet,
which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the
bedchamber, and dissolved the partition. At night-time, this
"alcove"--as our "maid" was wont to call it--had, in my eyes, a
specially sinister and suggestive character. Tom's distant and solitary
candle glimmered vainly into its darkness. _There_ it was always
overlooking him--always itself impenetrable. But this was only part of
the effect. The whole room was, I can't tell how, repulsive to me. There
was, I suppose, in its proportions and features, a latent discord--a
certain mysterious and indescribable relation, which jarred indistinctly
upon some secret sense of the fitting and the safe, and raised
indefinable suspicions and apprehensions of the imagination. On the
whole, as I began by saying, nothing could have induced me to pass a
night alone in it.

I had never pretended to conceal from poor Tom my superstitious
weakness; and he, on the other hand, most unaffectedly ridiculed my
tremors. The sceptic was, however, destined to receive a lesson, as you
shall hear.

We had not been very long in occupation of our respective dormitories,
when I began to complain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I
suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance, as I was usually a
sound sleeper, and by no means prone to nightmares. It was now, however,
my destiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose, every night to "sup
full of horrors." After a preliminary course of disagreeable and
frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision,
without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least
(on an average) every second night in the week.

Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion--which you please--of
which I was the miserable sport, was on this wise:----

I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness, although
at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and
accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as you know,
is incidental to ordinary nightmare. Well, while in this clairvoyant
condition, which seemed but the