a mystery, and I told the landlord of my adventure--of which I still felt the terror in all my frame. I ended by saying that he could, no doubt, explain the whole affair to me, but that he ought to have told me of it beforehand. He turned as pale as a sheet, and begged me never to tell any one what had happened to me, as he would risk the loss of his customers. He said many travellers had complained about that sound, which they had heard on bright moonlight nights--that he had examined everything with the utmost care and attention, and even had the floor of that room and the adjoining one taken up, as well as making inquisition into everything in the neighbourhood, without coming upon the faintest trace of anything to account for this awe-inspiring noise. It had not been heard for nearly a year before the night I speak of, and he had been flattering himself that the Principle--whatever it might be--which was haunting the room had ceased its operation. But seeing, to his great alarm, that in this he was mistaken, he determined that he would never, in any circumstances, allow anybody to pass the night there again." "Oh! how terrible!" cried Angelica, shuddering like one in the cold stage of an ague. "That is really most terrible! Oh! I am sure I should have died if anything like that had happened to me! But I have often woke up from sleep, suddenly, feeling an indescribable, inexplicable alarm and anxiety, as if I had been going through something terrible and alarming; and yet, I had not the slightest idea what it was that I had been going through, nor the very faintest recollection of any fearful dream, or anything of that kind. Rather I seemed to be waking from some condition of complete unconsciousness, like death." "I know that feeling perfectly well," Dagobert said. "Perhaps it points straight to the effect upon us of psychical influences external to us, to which we are compelled to yield ourselves up, whether we choose or not. Just as the mesmeric subject has no remembrance of the mesmeric sleep, or of anything which happens in it. Perhaps that sense of fear and anxiety which we feel on awaking (as we have said), of which the cause is hidden from us, may be the lingering echo of some mighty spell which has forced us out of ourselves." "I remember very distinctly," Angelica said, "some four years ago, the night before my fourteenth birthday, awaking in a condition of that kind. I could not shake off the terror of it for several days afterwards. But I strove in vain to remember anything about my dream (if dream it was, that had so terrified me). I knew, and I know quite well, that in the very dream itself I had told several people--my own dear mother amongst them--what the dream was, several times. But all I could remember when I woke was that I had told the dream. I could not recall the slightest trace of what the dream had been." "This strange psychical phenomenon," Dagobert said, "is closely connected with the magnetic principle."