ened into a settled gloom; that my
faculties (notoriously eminent) in a short time became clouded, nay,
eclipsed--necessitating my removal (I will not refine) to a madhouse.
Hey, is it not so?"

I nodded assent as well as I could. He paused, with a pinch between
finger and thumb, to nod back to me. Though his eyes were now
blazing with madness, his demeanour was formally, even affectedly,
polite.

"My wife never came back: naturally, sir--for she was dead."

He shifted a little on the boulders, slipped the snuff-box back into
his waistcoat pocket, then crossing his legs and clasping his hands
over one knee, bent forward and regarded me fixedly.

"I murdered her," he said slowly, and nodded.

A pause followed that seemed to last an hour. The stone which he had
strapped in my mouth with his bandanna was giving me acute pain; it
obstructed, too, what little breathing my emotion left me; and I
dared not take my eyes off his. The strain on my nerves grew so
tense that I felt myself fainting when his voice recalled me.

"I wonder now," he asked, as if it were a riddle--"I wonder if you
can guess why the body was never found?"

Again there was an intolerable silence before he went on.

"Lydia was a dear creature: in many respects she made me an admirable
wife. Her affection for me was canine--positively. But she was fat,
sir; her face a jelly, her shoulders mountainous. Moreover, her
voice!--it was my cruciation--monotonously, regularly, desperately
voluble. If she talked of archangels, they became insignificant--and
her themes, in ordinary, were of the pettiest. Her waist, sir, and
my arm had once been commensurate: now not three of Homer's heroes
could embrace her. Her voice could once touch my heart-strings into
music; it brayed them now, between the millstones of the commonplace.
Figure to yourself a man of my sensibility condemned to live on these
terms!"

He paused, tightened his grasp on his knee, and pursued.

"You remember, sir, the story of the baker in Langius? He narrates
that a certain woman conceived a violent desire to bite the naked
shoulders of a baker who used to pass underneath her window with his
wares. So imperative did this longing become, that at length the
woman appealed to her husband, who (being a good-natured man, and
unwilling to disoblige her) hired the baker, for a certain price, to
come and be bitten. The man allowed her two bites, but denied a
third, being unable to con