ng life and death, and wide regions beyond ordinary perception!
Assuredly the Ravens were good people, and a night in their house would
nowise have hurt me! They were doubtless strange, but it was faculty
in which the one was peculiar, and beauty in which the other was
marvellous! And I had not believed in them! had treated them as unworthy
of my confidence, as harbouring a design against me! The more I thought
of my behaviour to them, the more disgusted I became with myself. Why
should I have feared such dead? To share their holy rest was an honour
of which I had proved myself unworthy! What harm could that sleeping
king, that lady with the wound in her palm, have done me? I fell a
longing after the sweet and stately stillness of their two countenances,
and wept. Weeping I threw myself on a couch, and suddenly fell asleep.

As suddenly I woke, feeling as if some one had called me. The house was
still as an empty church. A blackbird was singing on the lawn. I said to
myself, "I will go and tell them I am ashamed, and will do whatever
they would have me do!" I rose, and went straight up the stairs to the
garret.

The wooden chamber was just as when first I saw it, the mirror dimly
reflecting everything before it. It was nearly noon, and the sun would
be a little higher than when first I came: I must raise the hood a
little, and adjust the mirrors accordingly! If I had but been in time to
see Mr. Raven do it!

I pulled the chains, and let the light fall on the first mirror.
I turned then to the other: there were the shapes of the former
vision--distinguishable indeed, but tremulous like a landscape in a
pool ruffled by "a small pipling wind!" I touched the glass; it was
impermeable.

Suspecting polarisation as the thing required, I shifted and shifted the
mirrors, changing their relation, until at last, in a great degree, so
far as I was concerned, by chance, things came right between them, and
I saw the mountains blue and steady and clear. I stepped forward, and my
feet were among the heather.

All I knew of the way to the cottage was that we had gone through a
pine-forest. I passed through many thickets and several small fir-woods,
continually fancying afresh that I recognised something of the country;
but I had come upon no forest, and now the sun was near the horizon,
and the air had begun to grow chill with the coming winter, when, to my
delight, I saw a little black object coming toward me: it was indeed the
r