observed the crown of his hat, which was of a
conical shape, according to the fashion
supposed to have been favoured by Guido Fawkes.
I wondered what he was looking up at. It
couldn't be at the stars; such a desperado
was neither astrologer nor astronomer. It
must be at the high gallows, and he was going
to be hanged presently. Would the
executioner come into possession of his conical
crowned hat, and plume of feathers? I
counted the feathers again; three, white;
two, green.

While I still lingered over this very
improving and intellectual employment, my
thoughts insensibly began to wander. The
moonlight shining into the room reminded
me of a certain moonlight night in England
—the night after a pic-nic party in a Welsh
valley. Every incident of the drive homeward
through lovely scenery, which the
moonlight made lovelier than ever, came back to
my remembrance, though I had never given
the pic-nic a thought for years; though, if I
had tried to recollect it, I could certainly have
recalled little or nothing of that scene long
past. Of all the wonderful faculties that
help to tell us we are immortal, which speaks
the sublime truth more eloquently than
memory? Here was I, in a strange house of
the most suspicious character, in a situation
of uncertainty, and even of peril, which might
seem to make the cool exercise of my
recollection almost out of the question;
nevertheless remembering, quite involuntarily,
places, people, conversations, minute
circumstances of every kind, which I had thought
forgotten for ever, which I could not possibly
have recalled at will, even under the most
favourable auspices. And what cause had
produced in a moment the whole of this strange,
complicated, mysterious effect ? Nothing but
some rays of moonlight shining in at my
bedroom window.

I was still thinking of the pic-nic; of
our merriment on the drive home; of the
sentimental young lady who would quote
Childe Harold, because it was moonlight.
I was absorbed by these past scenes and past
amusements, when, in an instant, the thread
on which my memories hung, snapped asunder;
my attention immediately came back to present
things, more vividly than ever, and I found
myself, I neither knew why nor wherefore,
looking hard at the picture again.

Looking for what ? Good God, the man
had pulled his hat down on his brows!—
No! The hat itself was gone! Where was
the conical crown? Where the feathers;
three, white; two, green ? Not there! In
place of the hat and feathers, what dusky
object was it that now hid his forehead—his
eyes—his shading hand? Was the bed
moving?

I turned on my back, and looked up. Was
I mad? drunk? dreaming ? giddy again? or,
was the top of the bed really moving down—
sinking slowly, regularly, silently, horribly,
right down throughout the whole of its length
and breadth—right down upon Me, as I lay
underneath?

My blood seemed to stand still; a deadly,
paralysing coldness stole all over me, as I
turned my head round on the pillow, and
determined to test whether the bed-top was
really moving, or not, by keeping my eye on
the man in the picture. The next look in
that direction was enough. The dull, black,
frowsy outline of the valance above me was
within an inch of being parallel with his
waist. I still looked breathlessly. And steadily,
and slowly—very slowly—I saw the figure,
and the line of frame below the figure, vanish,
as the valance moved down before it.

I am, constitutionally, anything but timid.
I have been, on more than one occasion, in
peril of my life, and have not lost my self-
possession for an instant; but, when the
conviction first settled on my mind that the
bed-top was really moving, was steadily and
continuously sinking down upon me, I looked
up for one awful minute, or more, shuddering,
helpless, panic-stricken, beneath the hideous
machinery for murder, which was advancing
closer and closer to suffocate me where I lay.

Then the instinct of self-preservation came,
and nerved me to save my life, while there
was yet time. I got out of bed very quietly,
and quickly dressed myself again in my upper
clothing. The candle, fully spent, went out.
I sat down in the arm-chair that stood near,
and watched the bed-top slowly descending.
I was literally spell-bound by it. If I had
heard footsteps behind me. I could not have
turned round; if a means of escape had been
miraculously provided for me, I could not
have moved to take advantage of it. The
whole life in me, was, at that moment,
concentrated in my eyes.

It descended—the whole canopy, with the
fringe round it, came down—down—close
down; so close that there was not room
now to squeeze my finger between the bed-
top and the bed. I felt at the sides, and
discovered that what had appeared to me, from
beneath, to be the ordinary light canopy of a
four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad
mattress, the substance of which was concealed
by the valance and its fringe. I looked up,
and saw the four posts rising hideously bare.
In the middle of the bed-top was a huge
wooden screw that had evidently worked it
down through a hole in the ceiling, just as
ordinary presses are worked down on the
substance selected for compression. The
frightful apparatus moved without making
the faintest noise. There had been no
creaking as it came down; there was now
not the faintest sound from the room above.
Amid a dead and awful silence I beheld before
me—in the nineteenth century, and in the
civilised capital of France—such a machine
for secret murder by suffocation, as might
have existed in the worst days of the
Inquisition, in the lonely Inns among the Hartz