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called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of
white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole
visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had
destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had
been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees--degrees nearly
imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject
as fanciful--it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of
outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to
name--and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have
rid myself of the monster had I dared--it was now, I say, the image
of a hideous--of a ghastly thing--of the GALLOWS!--oh, mournful and
terrible engine of Horror and of Crime--of Agony and of Death!
And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity.
And a brute beast --whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed--a
brute beast to work out for me--for me a man, fashioned in the image
of the High God--so much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day nor
by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the
creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly,
from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing
upon my face, and its vast weight--an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no
power to shake off--incumbent eternally upon my heart!
Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant
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