compensation for the
scandalous affront put upon me and my wife by his impertinent visit. Now,
at that time, I had no scruples against what are termed the laws of
honour, was by no means deficient in "pluck," and gifted, moreover, with
a somewhat excitable temper. Yet, I will honestly avow that, so far from
courting a collision with the dreaded stranger, I would have recoiled at
his very sight, and given my eyes to avoid him, such was the ascendancy
which he had acquired over me, as well as everybody else in my household,
in his own quiet, irresistible, hellish way.

The shuddering antipathy which our guest inspired did not rob his
infernal homily of its effect. It was not a new or strange thing which
he presented to our minds. There was an awful subtlety in the train of
his suggestions. All that he had said had floated through my own mind
before, without order, indeed, or shew of logic. From my own rebellious
heart the same evil thoughts had risen, like pale apparitions hovering
and lost in the fumes of a necromancer's cauldron. His was like the
summing up of all this--a reflection of my own feelings and fancies--but
reduced to an awful order and definiteness, and clothed with a
sophistical form of argument. The effect of it was powerful. It revived
and exaggerated these bad emotions--it methodised and justified
them--and gave to impulses and impressions, vague and desultory before,
something of the compactness of a system.

My misfortune, therefore, did not soften, it exasperated me. I regarded
the Great Disposer of events as a persecutor of the human race, who took
delight in their miseries. I asked why my innocent child had been smitten
down into the grave?--and why my darling wife, whose first object, I
knew, had ever been to serve and glorify her Maker, should have been thus
tortured and desolated by the cruelest calamity which the malignity of a
demon could have devised? I railed and blasphemed, and even in my agony
defied God with the impotent rage and desperation of a devil, in his
everlasting torment.

In my bitterness, I could not forbear speaking these impenitent
repetitions of the language of our nightly visitant, even in the presence
of my wife. She heard me with agony, almost with terror. I pitied and
loved her too much not to respect even her weaknesses--for so I
characterised her humble submission to the chastisements of heaven. But
even while I spared her reverential sensitiveness, the spectacle of h