To-night, to the awful diapason of the storm--he was penning one of these--the fruit of a tedious study of many papers and letters, tied up in bundles by his desk, all of them redolent of ominous or fearful associations.
I don't know why it is the hours fly with such a strange celerity in the monotony and solitude of such nightwork.

But Mervyn was surprised, as many a one similarly occupied has been, on looking at his watch, to find that it was now long past midnight; so he threw himself back in his chair with a sigh, and thought how vainly his life was speeding away, and heard, with a sort of wonder, how mad was the roar of the storm without, while he had quietly penned his long rescript undisturbed.
The wild bursts of supernatural fury and agony which swell and mingle in a hurricane, I dare say, led his imagination a strange aerial journey through the dark.

Now it was the baying of hell hounds, and the long shriek of the spirit that flies before them.

Anon it was the bellowing thunder of an ocean, and the myriad voices of shipwreck.

And the old house quivering from base to cornice under the strain; and then there would come a pause, like a gasp, and the tempest once more rolled up, and the same mad hubbub shook and clamoured at the windows.
So he let his Pegasus spread his pinions on the blast, and mingled with the wild rout that peopled the darkness; or, in plainer words, he abandoned his fancy to the haunted associations of the hour, the storm, and the house, with a not unpleasant horror.