The Black Cat

my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.

its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed me. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred.

Evil thoughts became my sole intimates—the darkest and most evil of thoughts.

, I say, the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the Gallows

There was a rope about the animal's neck.

I approached and saw, as if graven in bas-relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat.

he whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration.

One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree—hung it with the tears streaming fr

by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.