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.

THE BLACK CAT
cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly
marvellous. There was a rope about the animal's
neck.
When I first beheld this apparition —for I could
scarcely regard it as less - my wonder and my terror
were extreme. But at length reflection came to my
aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a
garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of
fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the
crowd -by some one of whom the animal must have
been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open
window, into my chamber. This had probably been
done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The
falling of other walls had compressed the victim of
my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread
plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the
ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the
portraiture as I saw it.
Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if
not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact
just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep
impression upon my fancy. For months I could not
rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and during
this period there came back into my spirit a halfsentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went
so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look
about me, among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another pet of the same species,
and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to
supply its place..
One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more
than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to
some black object, reposing upon the head of one
of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, which
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