that I did; and yet I vainly--oh! how vainly endeavour to plunge my eager glances through the mist--the dense, dark mist, which envelopes that idea,--reducing the thought to a suspicion so dim and vague that I dare not adopt it as a link in this history of mine! And yet why does the name of _Old Death_ produce a kind of shuddering within me, as if the influence of a very early recollection still partially remained? Wherefore does the appellation of _Benjamin Bones_ seem more familiar to me, than I can possibly conceive a reason for? There are moments when I appear to obtain the least glimmering--the least scintillation of a light at the remote profundity of this mystery,--a light which for an instant seems to promise an elucidation of all I wish to know in that respect, and then becomes suddenly extinguished--leaving me in a deeper and darker uncertainty than before!” Charles Hatfield pressed his hands violently to his forehead, as if to awaken recollections that slumbered too soundly to be otherwise aroused: but he could not conjure up nor evoke a single idea that was calculated to throw any light on the obscurity which enveloped every thing in his mind respecting the two names, the utterance whereof thrilled to his very soul. “What means that horrible phrase--_Old Death_?” he asked himself a hundred times: “and is it in any way connected with the name of _Benjamin Bones_? Is the phrase a name itself likewise? and if so, are _Old Death_ and _Benjamin Bones_ one and the same person? Why should those names produce upon me a disagreeable effect, as if I suddenly came in contact with a loathsome snake? I know not:--and yet it is so! The more I ponder upon that night when poor Jacob Smith shrieked out in his sleep--the more vivid do my recollections become concerning the horror that convulsed him, and the piercing--tense anguish which marked his tone! Oh! then, there must have been something dreadful--appalling--terrible in the associations which the names of _Old Death_ and _Benjamin Bones_ conjured up in the young man’s mind at the time; and this Benjamin Bones must have been a bad--a very bad person. But wherefore do I say ‘_must have been_?’ May he not be alive now? In a word--what do I know of him? Nothing! nothing! And yet--and yet, something seems to tell me that I did know more of him once than I do now! Perhaps, when I was a child, I heard evil things said of him,--things which have long since fled from my mind, leaving only a general and very faint impression behind--and that impression unfavourable to the object of it. Let me not then dwell longer on this point of my narrative--that narrative which I seek to compile from the myriads of ideas that until this night have been all scattered in my brain--never concentrated and reduced to order until now! Yes--from that chaos of memories, I have succeeded in rescuing reminiscences and thoughts sufficient to form a somewhat continuous and connected