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
I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy. By
the bye, gentlemen, this - this is a very well constructed house." (In the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all)
"I may say an excellently well constructed house.
These walls - are you going, gentlemen?- these
walls are solidly put together; " and here, through the
mere frenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a
cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion
of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of
the wife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs
of the Arch-Fiend! No sooner had the reverberation
of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered
by a voice from within the tomb! - by a cry, at first
muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and
then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman - a howl
- a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph,
such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly
from the throats of the damned in their agony and of
the demons that exult in the damnation.
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning,
I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the
party upon the stairs remained motionless, through
extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen
stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily.
The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with
gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators.
Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary
eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice
had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the
monster up within the tomb!
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