The click of her needles and the soft singing of the night-lamp are the only sounds breaking the stillness, the awful stillness, of this room. How the wind blows without! it must be whirling white gusty drifts through the split hills. If I were as free! Whistling round the gray gable, tearing the bleak boughs, crying faint, hoarse moans down the chimneys! A wild, sad gale! There is a lull, a long breathless lull, before it soughs up again. Oh, it is like a pain! Pain! Why do I think the word? Must I suffer any more? Am I crazed with opiates? or am I dying? They are in that drawer,--laudanum, morphine, hyoscyamus, and all the drowsy sirups,--little drops, but soaring like a fog, and wrapping the whole world in a dull ache, with no salient sting to catch a groan on. They are so small, they might be lost in this long, dark room; why not the pain too, the point of pain, I? A long, dark room; I at one end, she at the other; the curtains drawn away from me that I may breathe. Ah, I have been stifled so long! They look down on me, all those old dead and gone faces, those portraits on the wall,--look all from their frames at me, the last term of the race, the vanishing summit of their design. A fierce weapon thrust into the world for evil has that race been,--from the great gray Willoughby, threatening with his iron eyes there, to me, the sharp apex of its suffering. A fierce, glittering blade! Why I alone singled for this curse? Rank blossom, rank decay, they answer, but falsely. I lie here, through no fault of mine, blasted by disease, the dread with no relief. A hundred ancestors look from my walls, and see in me the centre of their lives, of all their little splendor, of their sins and follies; what slept in them wakes in me. Oh, let me sleep too! How long could I live and lose nothing? I saw my face in the hand-glass this morning,--more lovely than health fashioned it;--transparent skin, bounding blood, with its fire burning behind the eye, on cheek, on lip,--a beauty that every pang has aggravated, heightened, sharpened, to a superb intensity, flushing, rapid, unearthly,--a brilliancy to be dreamed of. Like a great autumn-leaf I fall, for I am dying,--dying! Yes, death finds me more beautiful than life made me; but have I lost nothing? Great Heaven, I have lost all! A fancy comes to me, that to-day was my birthday. I have forgotten to mark time; but if it was, I am thirty-two years old. I remember birthdays of a child,--loving, cordial days. No one remembers to-day. Why should they? But I ache for a little love. Thirty-two,--that is young to die! I am too fair, too rich, for death!--not his fit spoil! Is there no one to save me? no help? can I not escape? Ah, what a vain eagerness! what an idle hope! Fall back again, heart! Escape? I do not desire to. Come, come, kind rest! I am tired.