thout
waiting for a reply, proceeded to help me.

The sight of the food recalled to me the warnings I had received in the
garden. This sudden effort of memory restored to me my other faculties
at the same instant. I sprang to my feet, thrusting the women from me
with each hand.

"Demons!" I almost shouted. "I will have none of your accursed food. I
know you. You are cannibals, you are ghouls, you are enchanters. Begone,
I tell you! Leave my room in peace!"

A shout of laughter from all six was the only effect that my passionate
speech produced. The men rolled on their couches, and their half-masks
quivered with the convulsions of their mirth. The women shrieked, and
tossed the slender wine-glasses wildly aloft, and turned to me and flung
themselves on my bosom fairly sobbing with laughter.

"Yes," I continued, as soon as the noisy mirth had subsided, "yes, I
say, leave my room instantly! I will have none of your unnatural orgies
here!"

"His room!" shrieked the woman on my right.

"His room!" echoed she on my left.

"His room! He calls it his room!" shouted the whole party, as they
rolled once more into jocular convulsions.

"How know you that it is your room?" said one of the men who sat
opposite to me, at length, after the laughter had once more somewhat
subsided.

"How do I know?" I replied indignantly. "How do I know my own room? How
could I mistake it, pray? There's my furniture--my piano----"

"He calls that a piano," shouted my neighbours, again in convulsions as
I pointed to the corner where my huge piano, sacred to the memory of
Blokeeta, used to stand. "O, yes! It is his room. There--there is his
piano!"

The peculiar emphasis they laid on the word "piano" caused me to
scrutinize the article I was indicating more thoroughly. Up to this
time, though utterly amazed at the entrance of these people into my
chamber, and connecting them somewhat with the wild stories I had heard
in the garden, I still had a sort of indefinite idea that the whole
thing was a masquerading freak got up in my absence, and that the
bacchanalian orgie I was witnessing was nothing more than a portion of
some elaborate hoax of which I was to be the victim. But when my eyes
turned to the corner where I had left a huge and cumbrous piano, and
beheld a vast and sombre organ lifting its fluted front to the very
ceiling, and convinced myself, by a hurried process of memory, that it
occupied the very spot in which I had left my own