You might have thought that I should have taken refuge from the troubles of the morning by writing something gladsome and joyous, or even a regular, right-down hymn, with hopeful allusions to higher things; but far from it, owing to the gloom of the silent office, or the gloom of my mind, or perhaps both together, I produced stanza after stanza of the most deathly and grim poetry you could find in the language. It was called “The Witches’ Sabbath,” and I amazed myself by the ease with which I handled corpse-candles, gouts of blood, the gallows tree, ravens, owls, bats, lightning, the mutter of thunder, the stroke of Doom, spectres, demons, hags, black cats, broomsticks, and, in fact, every dreadful image you can possibly imagine from the classics at large. These things simply rolled off my pen; I could hardly write fast enough to catch up with the dance of horrors which seemed to get worse and worse in every stanza; and I remember wondering, while my nib flew, that if this ghastly thing was the result of a mild and temperate rebuke from Mr. Septimus Trott, what sort of poem I should have made if he had dealt bitterly and sarcastically and cruelly with me. I stopped to examine the question, and finally decided that it was the great patience and tenderness of Mr. Trott that had reduced me to this black depth of despair; and I believed that if he had slated me with all the force of barbed invective undoubtedly at his command, I should have gone to the other extreme and not stopped overtime, and been reckless and ferocious and mad, and very likely have produced a wild drinking-song, or some profane limerick of a far lower quality than this stately poem with all its horrors. One verse especially pleased me, and I set it down here without hesitation, because the time was actually coming when my poem would see the glory of print—not, of course, that I should see the glory of anything else in the way of reward. But merely to be in print glorifies one for a long time. “Through a dim gloaming with the hurtling crash And thunder of their batlike wings they came. Their tongues drip poison and their eyes they flash; And twenty thousand others did the same.” The effect of this horrible poem was entirely to restore my happiness; and hope, long a stranger to my heart, as they say, returned, like the dove to the ark. I simply rejoiced at the poem. I stopped registering policies for that night and copied out the twelve verses of “The Witches’ Sabbath” carefully. I said farewell to the messengers whose duty it was to guard the Apollo by night; and I took home my poem, filled with a great longing to read it to Aunt Augusta. She consented to hear it and was much interested; and so surprised and pleased did she appear to be that I had not the heart to tell her about the sorrowful thing that led to it.