I was unable to pursue the train of thought; a thousand feelings pressed upon me, and I wept bitterly.

Ever since my recovery from the fever I had been in the custom of taking every night a small quantity of laudanum, for it was by means of this drug only that I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life.

Oppressed by the recollection of my various misfortunes, I now swallowed double my usual quantity and soon slept profoundly.

But sleep did not afford me respite from thought and misery; my dreams presented a thousand objects that scared me.

Towards morning I was possessed by a kind of nightmare; I felt the fiend's grasp in my neck and could not free myself from it; groans and cries rang in my ears.