The history next went on to relate how the monks found the man so weak and emaciated that he could scarcely take food or answer their questions--and how they had him conveyed to their chapel at midnight, amid the glare of torches and the chants of the holy brotherhood, the imperishable fiend lying stretched by his side in the litter, in open spite of the holy water with which they had sprinkled it, and of the care with which they had caused it to be made so small that it was thought impossible for him to find room upon it--and how, when the wretched man was brought to the altar, they placed him upright before it, and began to pray, the fiend all the while being in his usual place next to his mortal fellow--and how, as the prayers proceeded and the voices of the assembled priests, of whom numbers had collected from distant places to witness the scene, ascended to the roof, filling the sanctuary with solemn and blessed music, the man turned a look of deathly fear, and gazed into the eyes of the spirit, the spirit giving back the look with the same thrilling and awful expression--and how the sufferer, when the venerable abbot came to the benediction, and offered to place his hands upon his head, sank gradually down, the fiend sinking with him--and how, as the last word was uttered, they vanished together into the earth, and on the instant the torches were extinguished, as by a sudden gust of wind. When I came to this point of the story, I lifted my eyes to look upon my mother. She sat upon her great chair opposite to me, looking straight at me with a glassy and vacant stare. Her limbs were rigid, and a spasm sat upon her features. "Mother!" I exclaimed; "mother!" I could not speak more. I was choking for utterance, my hair coiled out like living fibres, the room seemed to swim round and round. I stretched out my arms and seized her hands--they were cold, cold and clammy. Let me not dwell on it--in that spectral chamber I was alone with the dead! IV. For many days afterward the house was like a tomb. My mother was laid out in the state-room, which, never having been used in our time, had a dank, earthy smell, and was wretchedly bleak and naked. She lay upon the old square bed, whose hangings, swept up into a ring over head, were once a bright orange damask, but now an undistinguishable tawny mass, from which tracery and color had long disappeared. There was no other article of furniture in the apartment, which bore dreary evidence of the neglect into which it had fallen. The fire-place was closed up with a screen; and the fragments of arras that hung from the walls were eaten into shreds by the damp. Desolate was the pomp of the poor corpse that lay freezing under its stately coverlid, in the icy air of that room.