Guiding herself along by the wall, she advanced slowly, halting every second or third step to listen,--a strange precaution, since her own asthmatic breathing was enough to mask all other sounds. At last she neared the grate; and then her thin and cord-like fingers passed from the wall, to rest upon my head. It was with a kind of thrill I felt them; for I perceived by the touch that she did not know on what her hand was placed. She knelt down now, close beside me, and, stooping over, stirred the embers with her fingers till she discovered some faint resemblance to fire, amid the dark ashes. To brighten this into flame, she blew upon it for several minutes, and, even taking the live embers in her hands, tried in every way to kindle them. With a patience that seemed untirable, she continued at this for a long time; now selecting from the hearth some new material to work upon, and now abandoning it for another; till, when I had almost grown drowsy in watching this monotonous process, a thin bright light sprung up, and I saw that she had lighted a little piece of candle that she held in her hand. I think even now I have her before me, as, crouched down upon her knees, and sheltering the candle from the current air of the room, she took a stealthy, but searching, glance at the figures, who, in every attitude of weariness, were sleeping heavily around. It was not without a great effort that she regained her feet, for she was very old and infirm; and now she retraced her steps cautiously as she came,--stooping at intervals to listen, and then resuming her way as before. I watched her till she passed out; and then, as I heard her first heavy footstep on the stair, I slipped off my shoes and followed her. My mind throughout the whole of that night had been kept in a state of tension that invariably has the effect of magnifying the significance of every, even the very commonest, occurrences. It resembles that peculiar condition in certain maladies when the senses become preternaturally acute; in such moments the reason is never satisfied with drawing only from inferences for any fact before it; it seeks for more, and in the effort becomes lost in the mazes of mere fancy. I will own that as, with stealthy step and noiseless gesture, I followed that old hag, there was a kind of ecstasy in my terror which no mere sense of pleasure could convey. The light seemed to show ghastly shapes, as she passed, on the green and mouldy walls, and her head, with its masses of long and straggling gray hair, nodded in shadow like some unearthly spectre.