But the anagram was imperfect. Several letters included in the words of the sonnet, remained unused in my anagram. It was maddening to arrive so near success, to touch it as it were with one's, finger tips, yet fail for a few foolish trifling alphabetic signs. Desperately, frantically, I struggled to complete and perfect the anagram; but the more I juggled with the letters, the more bewildered, mazed, and helpless I became. My blood was a-fire, my head a horrible ache, my brain a whirling tornado of dancing vowels and consonants. The excitement, if still fed and unsatisfied, must lead, I felt, to brain fever or madness. I tore myself from the intoxicating pursuit, and fell, restless, sleepless, yet painfully weary, upon the couch beneath the window. It was a wild winter's night, and the view outside was full of "fowle horror and eke hellish dreriment." The cordon of turrets girding the city bulged eerily through the heavy gloom like limbs of a skeleton starkly protruding through a lampblack shroud. A beam of lurid moonlight uncannily lit up a distant stretch of bluff, stern crags, and nearer spectral foreground of towers, gables, and bartisans. Deep down in the hollow, dismal and desolate, under a sky of raven's feathers, glowered murder-stained Holyrood, congenial to the night. The solitary glimmer on the thunder and battle-scarred Castle Rock, looked like a match held up to show the darkness. The melancholy patter of the rain, and the discordant creaking and rattling of an iron shutter and rusty hinge, made music harmonious to the scene. The air of the musty room added to the contagious heaviness. In vain I stretched the astral sceptre of the soul upon the incorporeal pavement of conjecture. Nothing came of it, except that I slipped off the couch. I was too restless to think. Even the dog, on the rug at my feet, uneasily twitched and growled in his sleep. Suddenly, I became conscious of a creepy chill; my head, by some impulse foreign to my volition, was raised from its meditative pose; and in the spluttering, dying beam of the lamp's light, I beheld an Apparition. A grim and grisly goblin, of unwholesome oatcake hue, fluttered (no other word describes the wild and fitful unreliability of his movements) before my startled gaze; his eyes, like glassy beads, shone horridly. My dog raised his head, and looked over his shoulder. When his gaze fell on the Apparition he bounded to his feet, his limbs shaking like jelly, his eyes projecting like shining stars, and his hair standing up round his neck like a frill. He tried to growl, but the sound, shaken and softened by terror, issued to the night in lamb-like bleats. Yet more appalled by his vocal failure, he shrank, still feebly bleating, backwards under the sofa.