lifting her eyes. I turned and looked, but
saw nothing. Then with a feeling that there was yet something behind me,
I looked round over my shoulder; and there, on the ground, lay a black
shadow, the size of a man. It was so dark, that I could see it in the
dim light of the lamp, which shone full upon it, apparently without
thinning at all the intensity of its hue.

"I told you," said the woman, "you had better not look into that
closet."

"What is it?" I said, with a growing sense of horror.

"It is only your shadow that has found you," she replied. "Everybody's
shadow is ranging up and down looking for him. I believe you call it by
a different name in your world: yours has found you, as every person's
is almost certain to do who looks into that closet, especially after
meeting one in the forest, whom I dare say you have met."

Here, for the first time, she lifted her head, and looked full at me:
her mouth was full of long, white, shining teeth; and I knew that I was
in the house of the ogre. I could not speak, but turned and left the
house, with the shadow at my heels. "A nice sort of valet to have," I
said to myself bitterly, as I stepped into the sunshine, and, looking
over my shoulder, saw that it lay yet blacker in the full blaze of the
sunlight. Indeed, only when I stood between it and the sun, was the
blackness at all diminished. I was so bewildered--stunned--both by the
event itself and its suddenness, that I could not at all realise to
myself what it would be to have such a constant and strange attendance;
but with a dim conviction that my present dislike would soon grow to
loathing, I took my dreary way through the wood.

CHAPTER IX

"O lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding garments ours her shrorwd!
. . . . .
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth,
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud,

Enveloping the Earth--
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!"
COLERIDGE.

From this time, until I arrived at the palace of Fairy Land, I can
attempt no consecutive account of my wanderings and adventures.
Everything, henceforward, existed for me in its relation to my
attendant. What influence he exercised upon everythi