My first thought was to discover what I knew of the murderer, and cause instant pursuit to be made.

But I paused when I reflected on the story that I had to tell.

A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain.

I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable.

I well knew that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity.