"You were in quest of me?"
"I was."
"Have you anything to inquire of me?"
"Much"
"Speak, then."
'This is no place."
"No place? Poor wretch, I am independent of time and place. Speak, if you have anything to ask or to learn?"
"I have many things to ask, but nothing to learn I hope, from you."
"You deceive yourself, but you will be undeceived when next we meet"
"And when will that be?" said Stanton grasping his arm; "name your hour and your place."
"The hour shall be midday," answered the stranger, with a horrid and unintelligible smile, "and the place shall be the bare walls of a madhouse, where you shall rise rattling in your chains, and restling from your straw, to greet me-- yet still you shall have the curse of sanity, and of memory. My voice shall ring in your ears till then, and the glance of these eyes shall be reflected from every object, animate or inanimate, till you behold them again."
"Is it under circumstances so horrible we are to meet again?" said Stanton, shrinking under the full-lighted blaze of those demon eyes.
"I never," said the stranger, in an emphatic tone- "I never desert my friends of misfortune. When they are plunged in the lowest abyss of human calamity, they are sure to be visited by me."
"Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin, 1820.
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