She could not
throw them off her mind, but dwelt upon them with a kind of fearful
pleasure which we can understand from those which operated upon our
own fancies in our youth. These prepare the mind for the reception of a
thousand fictions concerning ghosts, witches, fairies, apparitions, and
a long catalogue of nonsense, equally disgusting and repugnant to reason
and common-sense. It is not surprising, then, that poor Alice's mind on
that night was filled with phantasms of the most feverish and excited
description. As far as she could, however, she concealed her agitation
from her parents, but not so successfully as to prevent them from
perceiving that she was laboring under some extraordinary and
unaccountable depression. This unfortunately was too true. On that night
she experienced a series of such wild and frightful visions as, when she
was startled out of them, made her dread to go again to sleep. The white
hare, the Black Spectre, but, above all, the fearful expression her
alarmed fancy had felt in Woodward's eye, which was riveted upon her,
she thought, with a baleful and demoniacal glance, that pierced and
prostrated her spirit with its malignant and supernatural power; all
these terrible images, with fifty other incoherent chimeras, flitted
before the wretched girl's imagination during her feverish slumbers.
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