ay never experience in any form any of
the disease's horrors. It was this, the most terrible malady that ever
tortured man, that was laying its ghastly, livid, serpentine hands upon me.
All at once, and without further warning, my reason forsook me altogether,
and I started from Dr. Moffitt's house to go to my boarding place. The
sidewalks were to me one mass of living, moving, howling, and ferocious
animals. Bears, lions, tigers, wolves, jaguars, leopards, pumas--all wild
beasts of all climes--were frothing at the mouth around me and striving to
get to me. Recollect that while all this was hallucination, it was just as
real as if it had been an undeniable and awful reality. Above and all
around me I heard screams and threatening voices. At every step I fell over
or against some furious animal. When I finally reached the door leading to
my room and just as I was about to enter, a human corpse sprang into the
doorway. It had motion, but I knew that it was a tenant of that dark and
windowless abode, the grave. It opened full upon me its dull, glassy,
lustreless eyes; stark, cold, and hideous it stood before me. It lifted a
stiffened arm and struck me a blow in the face with its icy and almost
fleshless hand from which reptiles fell and writhed at my feet. I turned to
rush into another room, but the door was bolted. I then thought for a
second that I was dreaming, and I awoke and laughed a wild laugh, which
ended in a shriek, for I knew that I was awake. I turned again toward my
own door, and the form had vanished. I jumped into my room and tore off my
clothes, but as I threw aside my garments, each separate piece turned into
something miscreated and horrible, with fiendish and burning eyes, that
caused my own to start from their sockets. My room was filled with menacing
voices, and just then a mighty wind rushed past my window, and out of the
wind came cries, and lamentations, and curses, which took shapes unearthly,
and ranged about the bed on which I lay shuddering. Die! die! die! they
shrieked. I was commanded to hold my breath, and they threatened horrors
unimaginable if I did not obey.

I now believed that my time had come to render up the life which had been
so much abused. I asked what would become of my soul when my body gave it
up, and they told me it would descend to the tortures of an everlasting
hell, and that once there, my present sufferings would be as bliss compared
with what was in store for me for an endle