Suddenly I was seized by an ungovernable desire to possess the flower—the colorless flower that hung far down in the death-damp of the chasm. A freezing terror crept through my blood as I recognized this decree of a will I had never been able to disobey. I felt myself crawling closer to the verge of the precipice; nearer, yet nearer, until I sat within the very jaw of the savage gulf. The dead clouds heaved their shroud-like forms and wavered overhead. I heard the rush of subterranean waters sounding a muffled requiem. The sickly flower with its long stem writhed and twisted, as a serpent stretches his folds into the air. Slowly back and forth it swayed, glaring at me like a lustreless eye. My brain reeled, and all the forces of my nature gathered up their increased strength for one fierce and final conflict. I felt the blood rage through my veins with the headlong fury of cataracts. The very spring of life within me was stirred and troubled, when, with one mighty strain, I drew myself up and fell backward on the grass. The whole world went out in utter darkness. Before my eyes stretched a vast, illimitable gloom, when suddenly out of its impenetrable depths above my head there grew and glimmered faintly a thin and wavering mist. Folding upon itself, it hung down, white and luminous, a cloud of palpitating nebulæ. Pricked with a thousand points of fire it gathered slowly to a nucleus in the center—a flickering speck, a disc, it flamed, blazed into a star, and lo! poised midway in the air, an aureole of light, it rested upon the brow of a female figure. Her scornful eyes looked down upon me with a lurid gleam that seemed to burn my soul. A smile of derision sat upon her lips that were more vivid in hue than the vermilion dye. Her locks were yellow as the sun at noontide; her skin was white as the leper’s; her breath hot as the desert air, and the light of the star upon her forehead burned red with the frightful redness of fresh blood. Suddenly I saw that the murky clouds on either side her form swarmed with a thousand dwarfed and warted shapes. Black and hideous, they knotted, flitted to and fro, in and out, with their formless claws and tumultuous motion. She spread her wings. Immediately there gathered all the dusky shapes—the legion demons of delirium with their needle eyes—and settled down upon her sable plumes. A shrill phantom laugh rang out, mocked itself by echoes that ran up in thin shafts of sound to the skies, and the SPIRIT OF FEVER had fled from me forever! The rays of the sun as it sank to rest, slanting through rose-colored avenues, fell upon the gray mists, and crowned the mountain’s summit in a rainbow of glory. The rising breeze swept through the forests with a soothing sound, and, eastward, the eye was lost in mellow lines of golden haze, which to my soul freed from captivity, seemed cathedral aisles of peace. [Illustration] OLD SIMLIN, THE MOULDER.