mother, mother." Then in a deep, earnest tone, "I'll be a human baboon,
and I'll do what man never yet did, nor beast--yes, and what never in
time will man do again."

Then he completely lost control of himself. He jumped from the bed.
Doctor Castleton stood near the doorway, and I quickly moved to his
side. The old woman had vanished. Peters poured forth yell on yell, such
as I had never conceived it possible for a human throat to utter. He
grasped a strong oak-pole, and broke it as I might have broken a dry
twig. I afterward placed the longer fragment of this pole with each of
its extremities on a large stone, the two about four feet apart; and
lifting into the air a rock weighing a hundred or more pounds, dropped
it on the middle of the fragment; and it did not even bend what this man
of awful strength had severed with his two hands as one would break a
wooden toothpick between the fingers. Then Peters picked up a stove
which stood, fireless, in the room; and he cast it through an open
window, seven or eight feet away, into the yard beyond, where it fell,
breaking into a hundred pieces. I need scarcely say that Doctor
Castleton and myself had left the room with decided alacrity. Well, to
terminate a description none too agreeable, Peters' wild delirium
continued until, out in the door-yard, forty or fifty feet from the
house, he fell, exhausted. Then we carried him back to his bed. Doctor
Castleton gave some directions to the old woman, and soon we left for
town, Peters being asleep.

"Strange," said Doctor Castleton, after we had driven for perhaps a
mile, "strange that a thought can do such things! A word is said, the
thread of memory is touched by suggestion, and it vibrates back through
half a century to some scene of terror stamped ineradicably upon the
brain--or if not upon the brain, then where?--and, lo! the reflexes