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 than ever. I can convey to you, good
reader, no notion, even the faintest, of the dreadful sensation always
more or less present to my mind, and sometimes with a reality which
thrilled me almost to frenzy--the apprehension that I had admitted into
my house the incarnate spirit of the dead or damned, to torment me and
my family.

It was some nights after the burial of our dear little baby; we had not
gone to bed until late, and I had slept, I suppose, some hours, when I
was awakened by my wife, who clung to me with the energy of terror. She