“But now that it was over, I fell back upon my chair, and my heart began to pound like a hammer against my side; and I sat there, panting and perspiring, like a man exhausted by some tremendous physical exertion. I felt sick and dizzy, and had a racking headache.--Of course, it was a mere optical delusion; a mere hallucination; not an actual, objective phenomenon, not a _ghost_; a mere projection from my own imagination. A long time afterward I talked with a physician about it. The substance of what he said was this: Consider the steadily increasing excitement under which my mind had been laboring for many days, in view of our approaching marriage; consider the interview that I had had with my uncle, only an hour or two earlier, and the high pitch of agitation to which it had wrought me up; consider that it was long past my customary bedtime, and that my brain was irritated by lack of sleep, for I had not slept much of any the night before; consider that my mother was just then the one person uppermost in my thoughts, having been vividly recalled to me first by the pencil I had found, and then by the drawing that I was looking at; consider finally that my bodily posture--bending over till my chest nearly touched my knees--was such as to keep the blood pent up in my head; and the occurrence becomes very easily explicable, especially so, as such hallucinations, when people are excited, are not uncommon experiences. This is what the medical man said. It is undoubtedly true; and something like it I had wit enough to tell myself immediately, at the time. But telling did no good. It is one thing to satisfy your judgment; another to tranquilize your feelings and hush your imagination. _They_ choose to accept the direct testimony of your eyes and ears, rather than the deductions of your common sense. “I knew, as I have said, that my nerves had simply played me a trick; but that knowledge did not prevent me from passing a most wretched, uncomfortable night--the rest of that night, till day-break. The memory of the thing persisted in haunting me, in spite of the efforts I made to forget it. Strive as I might, I could not shake off the fear, the uneasiness, that it had inspired. Thinking of it, even at this distance, I still wince a little. It produced a very deep impression, and must have been, I believe, in large part accountable for, as it was of a piece with, what happened next day--or, rather, the evening of the same day, for it was now early morning.” XI.