as a great and solemn sacrifice to Knowledge, whose Priest I was. The
very silence breathed to me of a stern and awful sanctity--the repose,
not of the charnel-house, but the altar. I heard the clock strike hour
after hour, but I neither faltered nor grew impatient. My mind lay hushed
in its design.

"The Moon came out, but with a pale and sickly countenance. Winter was
around the earth; the snow, which had been falling towards eve, lay deep
upon the ground; and the Frost seemed to lock the Universal Nature into
the same calm and deadness which had taken possession of my soul.

"Houseman was to have come to me at midnight, just before Clarke left his
house, but it was nearly two hours after that time ere he arrived. I was
then walking to and fro before my own door; I saw that he was not alone,
but with Clarke. 'Ha!' said he, 'this is fortunate, I see you are just
going home. You were engaged, I recollect, at some distance from the
town, and have, I suppose, just returned. Will you admit Mr. Clarke and
myself for a short time--for to tell you the truth,' said he, in a lower
voice--'The watchman is about, and we must not be seen by him! I have
told Clarke that he may trust you, we are relatives!'

"Clarke, who seemed strangely credulous and indifferent, considering the
character of his associate,--but those whom fate destroys she first
blinds, made the same request in a careless tone, assigning the same
cause. Unwillingly, I opened the door and admitted them. We went up to my
chamber. Clarke spoke with the utmost unconcern of the fraud he purposed,
and with a heartlessness that made my veins boil, of the poor victim his
brutality had destroyed. All this was as iron bands round my purpose.
They stayed for nearly an hour, for the watchman remained some time in
that beat--and then Houseman asked me to accompany them a little way out