e
dangers and miseries of life; its body has perished; but he will receive
in the end the crown of life. God has given him an early victory."

I know not what it was in him that rebuked my sullen pride, and humbled
and saddened me, as I listened to this man. He was dressed in deep
mourning, and looked more serene, noble, and sweet than any I had ever
seen. He was young, too, as I have said, and his voice very clear and
harmonious. He talked to me for a long time, and I listened to him with
involuntary reverence. At last, however, he left me, saying he had often
seen me walking into town, about the same hour that he used to go that
way, and that if he saw me again he would walk with me, and so we might
reason of these things together.

It was late when I returned to my home, now a house of mourning.

PART II

Our home was one of sorrow and of fear. The child's death had stricken us
with terror no less than grief. Referring it, as we both tacitly did, to
the mysterious and fiendish agency of the abhorred being whom, in an evil
hour, we had admitted into our house, we both viewed him with a degree
and species of fear for which I can find no name.

I felt that some further calamity was impending. I could not hope that we
were to be delivered from the presence of the malignant agent who
haunted, rather than inhabited our home, without some additional proofs
alike of his malice and his power.

My poor wife's presentiments were still more terrible and overpowering,
though not more defined, than my own. She was never tranquil while our
little girl was out of her sight; always dreading and expecting some new
revelation of the evil influence which, as we were indeed both persuaded,
had bereft our darling little boy of life. Against an hostility so
unearthly and intangible there was no guarding, and the sense of
helplessness intensified the misery of our situation. Tormented with
doubts of the very basis of her religion, and recoiling from the ordeal
of prayer with the strange horror with which the victim of hydrophobia
repels the pure water, she no longer found the consolation which, had
sorrow reached her in any other shape, she would have drawn from the
healing influence of religion. We were both of us unhappy, dismayed,
DEMON-STRICKEN.

Meanwhile, our lodger's habits continued precisely the same. If, indeed,
the sounds which came from his apartments were to be trusted, he and his
agents were more on the alert t