The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF CONSCIENCE

tween 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 woe!
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 of the good within me succumbed.
Evil thoughtsbecame my sole intimates - the darkest
and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my
usual temper increased to hatred of all things and
of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and
ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now
blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife,
so