I had an intuition, a consciousness that came to me in a flash, that my companion had awakened something. This knowledge brought with it a memory of mysterious horror, a memory that I had been here before. Then, with an ever increasing terror, I began to run up the steps I had just run down, but my feet had grown heavy and my limbs weak. Up and up I hurried, seeing nothing before me but an endless stretch of winding marble stairs. I did not know where my window was, I might even now have passed it. I heard nothing, but I knew I was being followed, and that whatever it was that followed me was gaining on me rapidly. I could hardly breathe: an agony of fear shook me. Then I heard close to my ear the bark of a dog. It was the window. I dropped on my knees and squeezed my head and shoulders through; I was almost free when I felt myself grasped from behind and with a scream I woke, shaking, panting, bathed in sweat. There came a time when these nightmares occurred so frequently that I got to be able to waken myself out of them. While I was actually dreaming――when I would have run a few steps down the stair, for example――a sudden foresight of what was coming would dawn upon me, and by a violent struggle I would break through the net of sleep and sit up in bed. Many of these dreams were connected with a dark, mahogany wardrobe which stood in my father’s bedroom. When I had begun to dream and found myself in that room I knew something evil was going to happen, and I would watch the wardrobe door and struggle violently to wake myself before it should open. Even when I was wide awake, and in broad daylight, this so ordinary piece of furniture came to have, for me, a sinister aspect. It was odd that I should have suffered so from these grisly nocturnal terrors, for in ordinary life I was not in any way a coward. A feeling of shame made me keep them a profound secret, and as I grew older they diminished, till by the time I was fifteen they had practically ceased. * * * * *