‘One dark night (I shall not forget that night) I was sitting up in bed, and counting off the weary hours as they limped laggingly by me. A weight had been on my heart all day, and racking fires had seemed scorching my brain; and so acute was the suffering, as if a band of hot iron were riveted closely round my forehead. I sat thinking--thinking of self--of my sorrows--of my strange destiny; and then there came back to me the remembrance of other days, and with them my mother--her care, love, and early tenderness, until my eyes were suffused with tears. Sudden I was startled by a low sigh breathed as it were close in my ears. I thought it delusion, but was soon undeceived--for it was repeated, and that too so audibly I could not mistake. I turned my eyes in the direction from whence it came. Again I caught it, and a strain of music rose soft and sweetly as if an angel sang it, and I saw indistinctly a shadow gliding past me. Then my name was distinctly sounded, and in a voice I knew too well. Terror had chained the powers of utterance, and I only gazed at vacancy with all the horrors of some dark, indefinite foreboding. The same sigh was repeated and the name, and then as a cloud passed over the moon, a figure stood in the apartment clad in the habiliments of the grave. It smiled sweetly upon me--it was my mother! I knew she must have passed from this to a better world, and the truth came over me with a cold sweat while the palsy of my limbs made the very bed tremble. I spread out my arms in agony, and wildly clasped the air. There was another sigh, the repetition of my name--and the figure vanished. ‘I rose and threw my night garments round me, and grasping my own flesh to be sure I dreamed not, I took the light from my table and commenced a search to find--what? my mother’s corse! for such I felt I must find her, if at all--the warning was not for nothing. I traversed room after room--met no one--and came to the wing of the building where I had ever deemed she lodged; and leaving the light at the door, I slowly lifted the latch and entered the apartment. _On a bed in the centre of the chamber, she lay lifeless._ There was no light there, but the moon broke forth at the moment, and I saw she was shrouded for the grave. ‘O! death!--death!--how solemn thou art! How awful, when thou comest on those we love! How thought at such moments crowds on the living! How the words that once issued from the lips that lie there, come up to recollection! How the eye that looks so chill and glassy, gleams again--and the face marble-cold and as expressionless, radiates with love, hope, happiness! There she lay dead, dead--and I not forgiven. She was gone. I had not heard her say, ‘I forgive thee, boy.’ Not a word--not a look--not a blessing--God! God!--what next! O, what next!