“We could not quit the room provided even all the doors had been flung wide open. Hast never heard tell of the _fascination_ of Danger? If so, then know that it was upon us in all its terrible force and power. We were bound, chained, rooted, riveted to the spot, by a potentiality never to be questioned, never to be despised, for its might, when once it fastens upon its victim, is merciless, gripping, stern and unrelenting. We felt that to stir, was to incur the hazard of an unknown, unguessed-at danger. ALL were fascinated by terror; to move was to add ten-fold to its power! It was a feeling akin to that experienced by the native of Ind, who roused from his mid-day slumber, wakes to feel the clammy folds of the cobra-capello, the dreadful hooded serpent of his clime, slowly writhing and winding beneath his garments about his naked flesh; and who realizes, as his heart stops beating and his blood runs icily with agony, and as the great big beaded drops of cold sweat ooze out from every pore, that to stir, to breathe, to even quiver under the pressure of his mortal fear, is certain, irrevocable, positive death--knowing as he does, that nor man nor beast hath ever yet lived a single hour after the fangs of the hooded snake have once opened a passage for the entrance of the King of Terrors! “And such was the pall that rested upon the eighteen persons in that room, as the detestable trinity moved slowly around that saucer on the floor; their eyes--their great, horny, bulging eyes--all the while scintillating and flashing with the very essence of intense malignity--malignity as of a devil! The female portion of the company I fear may never recover from the shock that night received. They did not faint, or scream, or swoon, as perhaps it might have been suspected they would under such diabolic circumstances, simply, however, for the reason that the tension of soul and nerve was altogether too severe and great to permit, even for an instant, the reaction which is an absolute prerequisite to relief by or through the methods indicated. “Probably the length of time that elapsed from the shriek of our comrade, till the final disappearance of the three monsters, did not exceed three minutes, yet in that brief space we had undergone years of terror.