I therefore resolved to attend, according to the letter of my
instructions, "on the next night, at the solemn hour of midnight,
to deliberate and act upon such matters as should then and there be
submitted to my consideration." The morning after I received this
message, I arose and resumed my usual occupations; but, from whatever
cause it may have proceeded, I felt a sense of approaching evil hang
heavily upon me; the beats of my pulse were languid, and an undefinable
feeling of anxiety pervaded my whole spirit; even my face was pale, and
my eye so heavy, that my father and brothers concluded me to be ill; an
opinion which I thought at the time to be correct, for I felt exactly
that kind of depression which precedes a severe fever. I could not
understand what I experienced, nor can I yet, except by supposing that
there is in human nature some mysterious faculty, by which, in coming
calamities, the dread of some fearful evil is anticipated, and that it
is possible to catch a dark presentiment of the sensations which they
subsequently produce. For my part I can neither analyze nor define it;
but on that day I knew it by painful experience, and so have a thousand
others in similar circumstances.
It was about the middle of winter. The day was gloomy and tempestuous,
almost beyond any other I remember; dark clouds rolled over the hills
about me, and a close sleet-like rain fell in slanting drifts that
chased each other rapidly towards the earth on the course of the blast.
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