All night long, all the long night!--long as lifetimes are, measured with slow-dropping arteries that drip away living blood. Once I watched by a dying woman; wild October rains poured without, but all unheard; in the dim-lit room, scented with quaint odors of lackered cases and chests of camphor-wood, heavy with perfumes that failed to revive, and hushed with whispers of hopeless comment, that delicate frame and angelic face, which the innumerable lines of age could only exalt and sweeten, shivered with the frosts of death; every breath was a sob; every sigh, anguish; the terrible restlessness of the struggle between soul and body in their parting writhed in every limb;--but there were no words other than broken cries of prayer, only half-heard on earth, till at length the tender, wistful eyes unclosed, and in a hoarse whisper, plaintive beyond expression, full of a desolate and immortal weariness, bearing a conviction of eternity and exhaustion that words cannot hope to utter, she said, "Will it never be morning?" And so this night stayed its pace; my room grew narrow and low; the ceiling pressed on my head; the walls forever clasped me, yet receded ever as I paced the floor; the floor fell in strange waves under me,--yet I walked steadily, up and down, up and down! Still the night stayed. Fever set its hurried pulses fleeting like wild-fire through every vein; a band of hot iron pressed above my eyes;--but these were adjuncts; the curse consumed me within. In every moment I heard those calm and fatal words, "I do not love you," sounding clear and sweet through the dull leaden air of night,--an air full of ghostly sounds, sighs about the casements, creaking stairs, taps at the window, light sounds of feet in the long hall below; all falling heedless on my ear, for my ghost walked and talked with me, a ghastly reality, the galvanized corpse of a murdered life.