The Library room, in which I was reading, is a large, lofty hall, fitted
with dark bookcases, heavy and huge as if for giants, singularly perfect
in point of inconvenience and inaccessibility, and good only in that
they bore a certain architectural proportion to the great height and
expanse of the dark room. My desk was so placed that my back was toward
the entrance, which was the balustraded opening, in the Library floor,
of a wide staircase; and close at my side and before me were racks with
muskets and spears, cases of curiosities, and other appurtenances of the
room. It being now past the middle of the night, when sleep is heaviest,
the stillness was perfect. My two shaded lamps made a small sphere of
dusky yellow light, which I felt to be surrounded and, as it were,
compressed by the thick darkness, which I could easily fancy to be
something tangible and heavy, settling noiselessly down from beneath the
lofty arches of the roof. The ancient penmanship and curious contents
of the faded pages before me carried my thoughts backward into the old
Colonial times, with their rigid social distinctions, lofty manners,
and ill-concealed superstition; and I mused upon grim old magistrates,
wizened witches, stately dames, rugged Indian-fighters, and all
their strange doings and sayings in the ancient days, until, between
drowsiness and imagining, I fell into a tangled labyrinth of romance,
history, and reverie.

Then all at once I seemed half to awake, and fell into one of those fits
of foolish nervous apprehension to which many even of the coolest and
bravest are liable in deep solitude and darkness,--and if they, how much
more an excitable person like myself! My heart throbbed for no reason,
and, sitting with my head bowed down upon my hands, I fancied the most
impossible dangers,--of men taking aim at me with the antique firearms
out of the far dark corners, or casting heavy weights upon me through