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I then rolled over, my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a slight scratch.

I now strove to rouse him -- "Queequeg!" -- but his only answer was a snore.

For though I tried to move his arm -- unlock his bridegroom clasp -- yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us twain.

But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament.

Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round me.

Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it.

I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me; but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery.

For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be broken.

My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bedside.

Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine.

At last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly waking from it -- half steeped in dreams -- I opened my eyes, and the before sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness.

For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes.

But she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room.

I felt worse and worse -- at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good slippering for my misbehavior; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed...

And it was so light too; the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house.

Sixteen hours in bed! the small of my back ached to think of it.

I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope for a resurrection.

But there was no help for it, so upstairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.

I felt dreadfully.

I had been cutting up some caper or other -- I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless, -- my mother dragged me by the legs out of the...