as coarse and revolting in it; how he
longed for fireside joys and sweet domestic peace, and pined with dreary
homesickness; how his heart cried out for me in the melancholy night.
And then even this comfort, that had softened the dull, longing pain
within, was denied me--no letters came. Mail after mail went and came,
and I grew feverish with suspense. I imagined him beset by ghastly
perils, and, with torturing uncertainty wearing my very life away, I
watched and waited as women are wont to do. Then dark rumors were afloat
of foes making a desperate advance, and of bloody battle pending. One
night a horror fell upon my troubled sleep--an appalling gloom, a
shuddering, suffocating sense of some impending doom. Battling fiercely
and blindly with this dread, invisible something, I awoke in deadly
fright, to find the terror no less clear to my perceptions, no less
palpable and real, and to wrestle with it still. Some blind instinct in
me called aloud for air; with difficulty mastering an almost
overpowering impulse to rush out into the night, I flew to the window,
raised it, and looked out. A fierce storm was raging--a storm of whose
very existence I had until that moment been unconscious. The thunder
rolled, and muttered, and broke in wild, fearful crashes. Sheets of
lightning every instant lighted up the blackness, and made the sky
terrific. Gushes of wind and rain wet and chilled me through and
through. Unmindful of it, with that fine interior sense aroused, I
listened with all my soul--not to the thunder's fearful voice, to the
wild beating of the storm, or to the wind's melancholy moaning, but to
_something_ on the tempestuous air, and yet a stranger to it.

There came a lull in the storm at last, and then, O God! O God! through
the sullen gloom, his voice was calling to me. Now faint and low, as if
his life was ebbing; then raised in agony, wild with supplication and
sharp with pain. I saw him covered with gaping wounds, on a hideous
field, piled with slain and soaked with blood. I went mad, I think: I
have a vague remembrance of rushing out into that fearful storm,
undressed as I was, with wild resolve to follow the sound of the voice,
to reach him somehow, or die in the mad attempt; of being brought back,
shut up in my room, and a sort of guard placed over me; of making wild
attempts to rush out again, and struggling ineffectually with those that
held me back--of raving wildly; then of long and dreamless slumbers,