“Ohio!” he replied, with a quickened heart throb.
“Then it must be only my fancy. I have certainly never been to Ohio, or anywhere else,” naively. “Yet the first moment we met, even when I was a little off in my head, you know, you did not seem like a stranger to me, but as if you somehow belonged to my past.”
“We have perhaps met in some former periods of existence, and you recognize me as a former soulmate. That is my theory. What is yours?”
Before she could reply a poor, melancholy-mad wretch came up to them with the startling complaint:
“I have been dead a week, and they will not bury me! I went into the deadhouse and got into a coffin, but four men shook me out of it, and said it was a shocking misfit! Do you know where I can find a coffin for myself, doctor?”
One of the most gruesome of all the manias of the melancholy-mad patient is the fixed conviction of one’s death and impending burial.
Doctor Rupert had met with the hallucination before, but coming at this moment of his budding happiness, it struck him with a strange chill like an evil omen, as if the shadow of a grave stretched dark and forbidding between their hearts.
They turned to the poor lunatic, a pale young man whose mind had given way at college from overstudy, in a sort of dismay, and Doctor Rupert exclaimed with unusual impoliteness:
“Do go away, Alden, with your dismal croaking! You are not really dead, you know, but only in a trance, and presently you will come out of it, and thank your lucky stars that you were not buried alive.”
But the maniac tossed back the long hair from his pale brow dejectedly and protested firmly: