hastily: "Hell
has risen up from below, and is raging with fire and fierce cracking
crashes of thunder; a whirlwind is raving through the midst of it; and
the earth is quaking with fear. Hold with your conjuring, lest the
spokes of the world splinter, and the rim that holds it together
burst."

"Fool! simpleton!" cried the magician: "have done with thy useless
prating! Tear back all the doors; throw the house door wide open."

The dwarf withdrew to perform his master's orders. Meanwhile Pietro
lighted the consecrated tapers; with a shudder he walkt up to the
great torch that stood upon the high candlestick; this too at last was
burning; then he threw himself on the ground and conjured louder and
louder. His eyes flasht; all his limbs shook and shrunk as in
convulsions; and a cold sweat of agony trickled from his brow.

With wild gestures, as if scared out of his senses, the dwarf rusht in
again, and leapt for safety within the circles. "The world is at the
last gasp," he shriekt, pale and with chattering teeth: "the storms
are rolling onward; but all beneath the voiceless night is dismay and
horrour; every living thing has fled into its closet, or crept beneath
the pillows of its bed to skulk away from its fears."

The old man lifted up a face of ghastly paleness from the floor, and
with wrencht and indistinguishable features screamed in sounds not his
own: "Be silent, wretch, and disturb not the work. Give heed, and keep
a fast hold on thy senses. The greatest things are still behind."

With a voice as if he would split his breast, he read and conjured
again: his breath seemed often to fail him; it was as though the
gigantic effort must kill him.

Hereupon a medley of voices were suddenly heard as in a quarrel, then
again as in talk: they whispered; they shouted and laught; songs
darted from among them, together with the jumbled notes of strange
instruments. All the vessels grew alive, and strode forward, and went
back again; and out of the walls in every room gusht creatures of
every kind, vermin and monsters and hideous abortions in the richest
confusion.

"Master!" screamed Beresynth: "the house is growing too tight. What
shall we do with all these ghosts? they must eat one another. O woe! O
woe! they are all with cub, and are come here to whelp: new brutes
keep sprouting out of the old ones, and the child is always wilder and
frightfuller than its dam. My wits are leaving me in the lurch. And
then this mu