The room was dark; nevertheless, my eye, grown accustomed to the light, and sharpened by the effects of the opium, enabled me to discover every object in the room distinctly. There was the bed, the counterpane, every little tuft worked on it with painful distinctness. There was the texture of the sheets; every fibre of the blankets, and last, but not least, the "Phantom Flea" hopping about and around me, and biting me here and there at his pleasure. The opium in some measure relieved the severity of the bite, though the latter was still painful enough to prevent me from going off to sleep altogether. The sensation of delirium (for I can call it nothing else) caused by the opium seemed to increase. The room appeared to grow lighter and lighter, till it seemed to glow with a phosphoric glare. My sight, hearing, and other senses grew rapidly more and more acute. Everything around me seemed to swell and dilate into proportions positively enormous. I felt myself grow larger, the bed grew larger, the room grew larger, the picture grew larger, and the _flea_ grew larger. Larger and larger swelled the bed; larger, _larger_, and ever larger grew the flea, till it attained the proportions of a horse. I noticed that the larger it grew, the less like a flea and more human it became. At length it appeared to stop growing, and to decrease, if anything. It had now assumed the size of a man, and a form almost human. There it stood at the foot of my bed, with its arms folded on its breast, and its eye steadily fixed upon mine. How shall I describe the horror of my situation--feeling my eyes rivetted on that hideous face with a preternatural fascination? To remove them was impossible. Yet to gaze on it further was death. I can describe my feelings to nothing else than the sensation of gradually turning into stone. I felt life fast ebbing from me. My head whirled, I gasped for breath. I tried to speak, to implore for mercy, but my voice was gone. I felt my last moment had come. The remorseless flea seemed conscious of my agony, and gloated on my sufferings, for he never took his stony eye off me all the while. Unable to move, and bathed in a profuse perspiration, I must have died in another instant from sheer agony and terror, had I not by a supernatural effort gathered up my last dying energies, and burst out in a loud, despairing yell that seemed to pierce the walls of the whole house. I felt the spell broken for the time. The fiend himself seemed startled by the sudden and preternatural shrillness of the scream, and for a moment changed the expression of his countenance. Feeling his eye no longer fixed upon mine with that fearful intensity, I dared to breathe again; but I had awoke Mrs. Wharton in the next room, and she knocked at my door to ask me what was the matter. "Nothing, thank you," I said; "only a dream; don't be alarmed." So Mrs. Wharton retired to her room again. The monster who had never left me during all this time, at length spoke.