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

WILLIAM WILSON
What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,
That spectre in my path?
CHAMBERLAYNE: Phar'onida.
LET me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not
be sullied with my real appellation. This has been
already too much an object for the scorn -for the
horror- for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant
winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast
of all outcasts most abandoned! -to the earth art
thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers,
to its golden aspirations? —and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between
thy hopes and heaven?
I would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a
record of my later years of unspeakable misery and
unpardonable crime. This epoch, these later years,
took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude,
whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign.
Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an
instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From
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