Lazarus himself could scarcely have been a more appalling object, when the voice of him who spoke as never man spake, said, “Lazarus come forth.” I made an unavailing attempt to cross the threshold, but could not. I was spellbound, or there was an invisible barrier erected against me, which I could not overleap. The buzzing in my ears, the pain and throbbing in my head, and racking aches, once more bent me to the earth, ill and reduced as I was, a relapse, thought I; and I felt my judgment once more giving way before the sweltering fiend, who had retreated but for a moment to renew his attacks with still greater fierceness. The moment he once more entered into me--the instant that I was possessed--I cannot call it by any other name--an unnatural strength pervaded my shrunken muscles and emaciated frame, and I stepped boldly into the hall. While I had stood at the door, listless and feeble as a child, hanging on the arms of the two topmen, after they had raised me from the hammock, the whole party had sat silently gazing at me, with their faculties paralysed with terror. But now, when I stumped into the room like the marble statue in Don Juan, and glared on them, my eyes sparkling with unearthly brilliancy under the fierce distemper which had anew thrust its red hot fingers into my maw, and was at the moment seething my brain in its hellish caldron, the negroes in the piazza, one and all, men, women, and children, evanished into the night, and the whole party in the foreground started to their legs, as if they had been suddenly galvanized; the table and chairs were overset, and whites and blacks trundled, and scrambled, and bundled over and over each other, neck and crop, as if the very devil had come to invite them to dinner in propria personal horns, tail, and all. “Duppy come! Duppy come! Massa Tom Cringle ghost stand at for we door; we all shall dead, oh--we all shall go dead, oh!” bellowed the father of gods, my old ally Jupiter. “Guid guide us, that’s an awful sicht!” quod the Scotch bookkeeper. “By the hockeytt speak if you be a ghost, or I’ll exercise [exorcise] ye wid this butt of a musket,” quoth the cowboy@an Irishman to be sure, whose round bullet head was discernible in the human mass, by his black, twinkling, half-drunken-looking eyes. “Well-a-day,” groaned another of them, a Welshman, I believe, with a face as long as my arm, and a drawl worthy of a Methodist parson; “and what can it be-flesh and blood, it is not--can these dry bones live?”