< Page:Faithhealingchri00buckiala.djvu
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PRESENTIMENTS, VISIONS, AND APPARITIONS

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You intend to throw me from the height into the sea below. Deny it, monster, if you can." The maniac stared at me for a moment, but I took especial care not to avert my gaze from his countenance, and he quailed beneath it. He stammered a few incoherent words, and strove to pass me, but I barred his passage with extended arms. He looked vacantly right and left, and then flung himself upon my neck and burst into tears. "'T is true, 't is true, my friend. The thought has haunted me day and night like a flash from the lurid fire of hell. It was for this I brought you here. Look! You stand within a foot of the edge of the parapet. In another instant the work would have been done." The demon had left him. His eye was unsettled, and the white foam stood in bubbles on his white lips, but he was no longer tossed by the same mad excitement under which he had been laboring, for he suffered me to lead him home without a single word. A few days' repose, bleeding, abstinence, completely restored him to his former self, and, what is more extraordinary, the circumstance was never mentioned between us. My Fate was at work.

What there is in this narrative to imply anything extraordinary, in view of the extraordinary circumstances, I am unable to perceive. Beaumetz had been unusually calm; he became greatly excited. Every action he performed and every word he said, for several days, was sufficient to excite alarm as to his mental condition. He was on the verge of an attack of acute mania. That Talleyrand had recognized his condition to some extent is apparent; that his mind perceived the danger, and that he took the only natural course to escape, is also clear; and the history of lunatic asylums abounds in accounts by friends or attendants of their discerning at the right moment that the maniac meant to perpetrate a tragic deed. In some instances it has been foreseen, and the wife, after predicting her own death at his hands, has succumbed to the maniacal fury of the once loving husband rather than allow him to be placed under restraint. A case of this kind, originating in the

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