tears, hastily scratched his name from the list of competitors, and
then rushed out of doors to tear his ruined essay into fragments; and
we found him that afternoon lying on the grass, with his head on his
hand, just as he lay now, having sobbed himself to sleep.

I dropped the curtains of the bed, drew those of the window more
closely, to exclude the shrill winter wind that was blowing the slant
sleet against the clattering window-panes, broke up the lump of cannel
coal in the grate into a bright blaze that subsided into a warm, steady
glow of heat and light, drew an arm-chair and a little table up to the
cheerful fire, and sat down to read the manuscript which the quiet man
behind the curtains had given me. Why shouldn't I (I was his physician)
make myself as comfortable as was possible at two o'clock of a stormy
winter night, in a house that contained but two persons beside my
German patient,--a half-stupid serving-man, doubtless already asleep
down-stairs, and myself? This is what I read that night, with the
comfortable fire on one side, and Death, holding strange colloquy with
the fitful, screaming, moaning wind, on the other.

As I wish simply to relate what has happened to me, (thus the
manuscript began,) what I attempted, in what I sinned, and how I
failed, I deem no introduction or genealogies necessary to the first
part of my life. I was an only child of parents who were passionately
fond of me,--the more, perhaps, because an accident that had happened
to me in my childhood rendered me for some years a partial invalid. One
day, (I was about five years old then,) a gentleman paid a visit to my
father, riding a splendid Arabian horse. Upon dismounting, he tied the
horse near the steps of the piazza instead of the horseblock, so that I
found I was just upon the level with the stirrup, standing at a certain
elevation. Half as an experiment, to try whether I could touch the