“Gradually--as is apt to happen, if you fix your eyes for any length of time upon a single spot in some small object--gradually the picture blurred, becoming simply a formless smudge upon the white surface of the paper; a lapse on the part of my eyesight, which I, absorbed in the effort I was making to remember, did not attempt to correct, but which in due time, as was natural, corrected itself; and again the picture stood out as distinct as before. Now, however, at once, every other thought and every other feeling were swept away, clean out of my head, by a sensation--I shall not be able to define it; you will easily conceive it; a sensation half of amazement, half of terror; for, without having changed in size, the face seemed to have changed totally in quality; it seemed to have ceased to be a face drawn with black lead upon paper, and to have become a face in veritable flesh and blood. The hair had apparently become hair. There was color in the cheeks. And the eyes were liquid, living eyes. They--the eyes--were what most affected me. Large, black, mournful, as her eyes had been in life, they looked into my eyes with an expression--I can't describe it. It was what you would call an expression of intense agony, and of appeal; as though it were an agony of my causing, and one that she appealed to me to relieve. The lips--bluish white, as her lips were, toward the end of her life--the lips seemed to move, and kept moving, as if trying to speak, but unable to; until at last _they succeeded_; and I could have vowed that I heard, in her own recognizable voice, just a little above a whisper, these words: 'There is no more chance of its taking place than there is of the sun's failing to rise. Beware!'--the words that my uncle had spoken down stairs. I was so much startled, so much terrified, that I jumped up from my chair. Thereat, instantly, the illusion ended. Again it was only a crude pencil drawing upon the page of my sketch-book. I can't tell how long it had lasted. Very likely not longer than two or three seconds, though it seemed at least as many minutes. I don't think I had breathed once. I don't think my heart had given a single beat. It had literally paralyzed me with fear.