CHAPTER XVIII.



I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious
illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me
called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical
quality.

I had the fever in March, which was cold and blustering and dreary that
year, and every evening as night fell, if by chance my mother was not
near me, a great sadness would overwhelm my soul. (It was an oppression
coming on at twilight, from which animals, and beings with a temperament
like mine suffer almost equally.)

My curtains were kept open, and I always had a view of the pathetic
looking little table with its cups of gruel and bottles of medicines.
And as I gazed at these things, so suggestive of sickness, they took on
strange shapes in the darkness of the silent room,--and at such times
there passed through my head a procession of grotesque, hideous and
alarming images.

Upon two successive evenings at dusk there appeared to me, in the half
delirium of fever, two persons who caused me the most extreme terror.

The first one was an old woman, hump-backed and very ugly, but with a
fascinating ugliness, who without my hearing her open the door, without
my seeing any one rise to meet her, stole noiselessly to my side. She
departed, however, without speaking to me; but as she turned to go her
hump became visible, and I saw that there was an opening in it, and