As manager of this exhibition, I would request the orchestra to play something gloomy and grand, during the remainder of the performance; something weird, mysterious; something in which you can hear the soughing of the wind through the pines of the Hartz Mountains or the Black Forest. A passage from a _Faust_ opera or _Der Freischutz___ might meet the case; for it began to be intimated to me, now that I was sufficiently clairaudient to be able to dispense almost entirely with the pencil, that his Satanic Majesty was no indifferent spectator of the preparation of the man who was about to interfere so signally with his plans and pursuits. Thereupon there began to steal over me for the first time,
'A sense of something dreadful, something near.
However it was managed, from this moment till the end of this phase of life I am narrating, I had an almost constant sense of the presence of 'genii of the pit,' of vast intelligence, cruel as ever Satan was imagined, relentless as fate, cold as Dante's ice hells could make them. At first, some influence led me to review the traditional history and prospects of my supposed distinguished visitor, at some length. I discussed the state of his case with no little unction, though shaking in my boots, and in momentary expectation of being gobbled up, body and soul, and whisked off in sulphurous smoke, with only a sulphur-burnt hole in the carpet to mark the spot where I saw the last of earth.
Presently my inseparable companion broke in with:
'He hears you! he hears you! and never may it be my lot again to look upon--' ... 'There he is again, glaring with inexpressible rage upon the comparatively insignificant man who just now so plainly revealed to him 'the true state of the case.' I am almost afraid to look upon that awful visage. 'The state of the case is it?' he exclaims. 'We will see what is the state.''--
There is a break here in the manuscript, which is resumed thus: 'You have conquered! frantic with rage he has fled, never, I trust, to return.'
How will I remember what happened during that awful pause? It was spent, I suppose, in a hand-to-hand conflict with the Prince of Darkness; the agreeableness of which was not enhanced by my vivid recollection of the 'bit of a discooshin' between Christian and Apollyon depicted in the old family Pilgrim's Progress. We are truly 'the stuff that dreams are made of.' What mattered it to me, on that bland summer afternoon, since I was of this opinion, whether it was Beelzebub himself or some departed 'blazing tinman,' with a suit of his majesty's old clothes on, while himself, all snug at home,