himself at the sight, and in the next moment we were both in the passage. Our first care was to remove the key, and lock the door on the inside; and during this, we had the satisfaction to discover, that there was no one in the church, no one approaching it. Our fears had deceived us; we retired from the door, looked at each other with a kind of breathless, half-revived confidence, and began our progress through the vault in silence and in safety. In safety! my God! I yet tremble at the thought of that subterranean journey, amid the vaults of a convent, with a parricide for my companion. But what is there that danger will not familiarize us with? Had I been told such a story of another, I would have denounced him as the most reckless and desperate being on earth--yet _I was the man_. I had secured the lamp, (whose light appeared to reproach me with sacrilege at every gleam it shed on our progress), and followed my companion in silence. Romances have made your country, Sir, familiar with tales of subterranean passages, and supernatural horrors. All these, painted by the most eloquent pen, must fall short of the breathless horror felt by a being engaged in an enterprise beyond his powers, experience, or calculation, driven to trust his life and liberation to hands that reeked with a father’s blood. It was in vain that I tried _to make up my mind_,--that I said to myself, “This is to last but for a short time,”--that I struggled to force on myself the conviction that it was necessary to have such associates in desperate enterprises;--it was all in vain. I trembled at my situation,--at myself, and that is a terror we can never overcome. I stumbled over the stones,--I was chilled with horror at every step. A blue mist gathered before my eyes,--it furred the edges of the lamp with a dim and hazy light. My imagination began to operate, and when I heard the curses with which my companion reproached my involuntary delay, I began almost to fear that I was following the steps of a demon, who had lured me there for purposes beyond the reach of imagination to picture. Tales of superstition crowded on me like images of terror on those who are in the dark. I had heard of infernal beings who deluded monks with the hopes of liberation, seduced them into the vaults of the convent, and then proposed conditions which it is almost as horrible to relate as to undergo the performance of. I thought of being forced to witness the unnatural revels of a diabolical feast,--of seeing the rotting flesh distributed,--of drinking the dead corrupted blood,--of hearing the anthems of fiends howled in insult, on that awful verge where life and eternity mingle,--of hearing the hallelujahs of the choir, echoed even through the vaults, where demons were yelling the _black mass_ of their infernal Sabbath.--I thought of all that the interminable passages, the livid light, and the diabolical companion, might suggest.