A Silent Witness
— I —
THE LIVING DEATH
I doubt if a more terrible thing ever happened to any man than that which happened to me in the autumn of 1883. The memory of it all is with me now as though it were but yesterday. And sometimes I wake shrieking in my dreams, and lie awake all night, oppressed with a great agony of fear.
I was a clerk in Burton’s Bank at Exeter. For some days I had been queer and out of sorts. More than once I had been conscious of what seemed to me a sudden numbness of the limbs. For instance, on two separate occasions I had been incapable of rising from my office-stool. My wife and fellow-clerks noticed that I did not seem to be in my usual health, and my wife in particular had been urgent in entreating me to take my annual holiday without delay. But I had some
