scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard
was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the
giant-grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me, and the
air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight
that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves
around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted-dead, and that they
were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.

* * * * *

Gradually there came a sort of vague beginning of consciousness; then a
sense of weariness that was dreadful. For a time I remembered nothing;
but slowly my senses returned. My feet seemed positively racked with
pain, yet I could not move them. They seemed to be numbed. There was an
icy feeling at the back of my neck and all down my spine, and my ears,
like my feet, were dead, yet in torment; but there was in my breast a
sense of warmth which was, by comparison, delicious. It was as a
nightmare--a physical nightmare, if one may use such an expression; for
some heavy weight on my chest made it difficult for me to breathe.

This period of semi-lethargy seemed to remain a long time, and as it
faded away I must have slept or swooned. Then came a sort of loathing,
like the first stage of sea-sickness, and a wild desire to be free from
something--I knew not what. A vast stillness enveloped me, as though all
the world were asleep or dead--only broken by the low panting as of some
animal close to me. I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a
consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent
the blood surging up through my brain. Some great animal was lying on me
and now licking my throat. I feared to stir, for some instinct of
prudence bade me lie still; but the brute seemed to realise that there