I went to bed and fell asleep almost on the minute, but I could not have slept long when I was wakened by the noise of the wind against the shutters.  The rain had ceased, but the blast was still roaring without.  Minny and her child were in a room which opened out of the parlor opposite my own.  The lamp which was burning there threw a dim light into my chamber, and showed me each familiar object and my little boys asleep beside me.

Some one says that between the hours of one and four in the morning the human mind is not itself.  I fully believe it.  In those hours you do not “fix your mind” on melancholy subjects—­they fix themselves upon you.  If you turn back into the past, there comes up before you every occasion on which you made a fool of yourself, every lost opportunity, every slight injury you ever experienced.  If you look at the future, you see nothing but coming failure and disappointment.  The present moment connects itself with every tale you ever heard or read of ghosts, murder, vampires or robbers.

That night, either because of the wind or because I had taken too strong coffee, I fell into “the fidgets,” as this state of mind is sometimes called, and selected for immediate cause of discomfort the Panther’s presentiment about the red fox.  Who could explain the mysterious way in which animals are warned of approaching danger?  Perhaps the old science of divination was not so entirely a delusion; and then I remembered all the old stories in Roman history of people who had come to grief by neglecting the oracles.  The old idea that whatever incident is considered as an omen will be such in reality, seemed to me at that hour of the night not wholly an unreasonable theory.

I had known, to be sure, some fifty presentiments which came to nothing, but then I had known as many as three which had been verified:  perhaps the present case might be one of the exceptions to the rule.  Then I remembered all the stories in Scott’s Demonology, which I had lately read, and quite forgot all the arguments intended to disprove them.

[Illustration:  The Attack on the “Panther.”]

I thought of the broken gun-lock:  I thought it not improbable that the Panther had, when at Ryan’s, mentioned that he was coming to our house, and that it was very likely he had let it appear that he carried his money with him.  Ryan’s was one of the worst places in all the State.  I remembered that the money was in the house, and I began to wish, like the Panther, that I had something to “catch up.”  Then there were so many noises about!  I heard footsteps, which you will always hear if you listen for them on a windy night.  When our petted old cat jumped from his place on the parlor sofa to lie down before the fire, I started up in bed in a sudden fright.

I must have been in this uncomfortable state of mind and body for the best part of an hour before I remembered that in a drawer in the front parlor lay two little old-fashioned pistols, unloaded but in good order.