"Have something, anyway," he said, doggedly.
"Why, what do you think can possibly happen?"
"Don't know. Always like to have something to catch up. Good-night, mamma.
You go to sleep."
I went to bed and fell asleep almost on the minute, but I could not have
slept long when I was wakened by the noise of the wind against the
shutters. The rain had ceased, but the blast was still roaring without.
Minny and her child were in a room which opened out of the parlor opposite
my own. The lamp which was burning there threw a dim light into my
chamber, and showed me each familiar object and my little boys asleep
beside me.
Some one says that between the hours of one and four in the morning the
human mind is not itself. I fully believe it. In those hours you do not
"fix your mind" on melancholy subjects--they fix themselves upon you. If
you turn back into the past, there comes up before you every occasion on
which you made a fool of yourself, every lost opportunity, every slight
injury you ever experienced. If you look at the future, you see nothing
but coming failure and disappointment. The present moment connects itself
with every tale you ever heard or read of ghosts, murder, vampires or
robbers.
That night, either because of the wind or because I had taken too strong
coffee, I fell into "the fidgets," as this state of mind is sometimes
called, and selected for immediate cause of discomfort the Panther's
presentiment about the red fox.
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