I had the fever in March, which was cold and blustering4 and dreary5 that year, and every evening as night fell, if by chance my mother was not near me, a great sadness would overwhelm my soul. (It was an oppression coming on at twilight6, from which animals, and beings with a temperament7 like mine suffer almost equally.)
My curtains were kept open, and I always had a view of the pathetic looking little table with its cups of gruel8 and bottles of medicines. And as I gazed at these things, so suggestive of sickness, they took on strange shapes in the darkness of the silent room,—and at such times there passed through my head a procession of grotesque9, hideous10 and alarming images.
Upon two successive evenings at dusk there appeared to me, in the half delirium11 of fever, two persons who caused me the most extreme terror.
The first one was an old woman, hump-backed and very ugly, but with a fascinating ugliness, who without my hearing her open the door, without my seeing any one rise to meet her, stole noiselessly to my side. She departed, however, without speaking to me; but as she turned to go her hump became visible, and I saw that there was an opening in it, and there popped out from this hole the green head of a parrot which the old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, “Cuckoo,” in a thin, squeaking12, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the frightful13 old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that “Cuckoo!” a cold perspiration14 formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared and then I realized that it was only a dream.
The next evening a tall thin man, clothed in the black dress of a minister, appeared to me. He did not come near me, but kept close to the wall and whirled, with body all bent15 over, rapidly and noiselessly about the room. His
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