"'Pause!' said the voice, coming out once more from the cloud of white mist, and chilling my very marrow with the sad solemnity of its tone. 'Look once again!' I looked, and the mists went rolling by as before, while the music changed to wild discord; and when the sight became clear again, I saw the men of the nation struggling over bags of gold and quarrelling for a black shadow that flitted about in their midst, while cries of want and wails of despair went up and sickened the heavens! I closed my eyes and tried to close my ears, but I could not shut out the voice of the sorceress, saying once more from her shroud of white mist: "'Look yet again, and for the last time! Behold the worm that gnaws away the bravery of a nation and makes it a prey for the spoiler!' Heart-brokenly sad was the music now, as the vision changed once more, and I saw a great crowd of men, each in the uniform of an officer of the United States army, clustered around one who seemed to be their chief. But while I looked, I saw one by one totter and fall, and directly I perceived that the _epaulette or shoulder-strap on the shoulder of each was a great hideous yellow worm, that gnawed away the shoulder and palsied the arm and ate into the vitals_. Every second, one fell and died, making frantic efforts to tear away the reptile from its grasp, but in vain. Then the white mists rolled away, and I saw the strange woman standing where she had been when the first vision began. She was silent, the music was hushed, Adolph Von Berg had fallen back asleep in his chair, and drawing out my watch, I discovered that only ten minutes had elapsed since the sorceress spoke her first word. "'You have seen all--go!' was her first and last interruption to the silence. The instant after, the curtain fell. I kicked Von Berg to awake him, and we left the house. The _coupe_ was waiting in the street and set me down at my lodgings, after which it conveyed my companion to his. Adolph did not seem to have a very clear idea of what had occurred, and my impression is that he went to sleep the moment the first strain of music commenced. "As for myself, I am not much clearer than Adolph as to how and why I saw and heard what I know that I did see and hear. I can only say that on that night of the twentieth of December, 1860, the same on which, as it afterward appeared, the ordinance of secession was adopted at Charleston, I, in the little old two-story house in the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, witnessed what I have related. "I left Havre in the old Arago only a fortnight afterwards. Perhaps the incident helped to drive me home. At all events I was ashamed to remain abroad when the country was in danger. Now you know quite as much of the affair as myself--which is not saying much!"