of madness.  He thought to himself, “How could he have gained entrance here?”—­“Would you not wish to be delivered from it?” Stanton tossed on his straw, and its rustling seemed to answer the question.  “I have the power to deliver you from it.”  Melmoth spoke very slowly and very softly, and the melodious smoothness of his voice made a frightful contrast to the stony rigor of his features, and the fiendlike brilliancy of his eyes.  “Who are you, and whence come you?” said Stanton, in a tone that was meant to be interrogatory and imperative, but which, from his habits of squalid debility, was at once feeble and querulous.  His intellect had become affected by the gloom of his miserable habitation, as the wretched inmate of a similar mansion, when produced before a medical examiner, was reported to be a complete Albino.—­His skin was bleached, his eyes turned white; he could not bear the light; and, when exposed to it, he turned away with a mixture of weakness and restlessness, more like the writhings of a sick infant than the struggles of a man.

Such was Stanton’s situation.  He was enfeebled now, and the power of the enemy seemed without a possibility of opposition from either his intellectual or corporeal powers.

. . . . .

Of all their horrible dialogue, only these words were legible in the manuscript, “You know me now.”—­“I always knew you.”—­“That is false; you imagined you did, and that has been the cause of all the wild . of the . . . . . . of your finally being lodged in this mansion of misery, where only I would seek, where only I can succor you.”—­“You, demon!”—­ “Demon!—­Harsh words!—­Was it a demon or a human being placed you here?—­Listen to me, Stanton; nay, wrap not yourself in that miserable blanket,—­that cannot shut out my words.  Believe me, were you folded in thunder clouds, you must hear me!  Stanton, think of your misery.  These bare walls—­what do they present to the intellect or to the senses?—­Whitewash, diversified with the scrawls of charcoal or red chalk, that your happy predecessors have left for you to trace over.  You have a taste for drawing—­I trust it will improve.  And here’s a grating, through which the sun squints on you like a stepdame, and the breeze blows, as if it meant to tantalize you with a sigh from that sweet mouth, whose kiss you must never enjoy.  And where’s your library,—­intellectual man,—­traveled man?” he repeated in a tone of bitter derision; “where be your companions, your peaked men of countries, as your favorite Shakespeare has it?  You must be content with the spider and the rat, to crawl and scratch round your flock bed!  I have known prisoners in the Bastille to feed them for companions,—­why don’t you begin your task?  I have known a spider to descend at the tap of a finger, and a rat to come forth when the daily meal was brought, to share it with his fellow prisoner!—­How delightful to have vermin