. the oldest stories are about a beast that appeared in the wintertime, roaming the countryside at night, stealing the souls of children and sick peop...e while they slept. And this guy Nicholas, and later Sons of Nicholas, who were unaffected by the beast's touch and would hunt it down and kill it. That's where the name Saint Nicholas's Beast comes from, I guess. I think this goes way back, hundreds of years before the Black Death." Like what, the 3rd century?" Jovie piped in.Chester stroked his. Saturday morning I woke up to go to the bathroom andvery quietly took out the cigarettes, opened them andplaced two on the bedside table on her side and two onthe bedside table on my side of the bed, and a lighterand ashtray on each.I went back to sleep for a while and woke up with mywife cuddling me and nuzzling my cheek. She was readyfor our usual Saturday morning fuck session. Sheapparently hadn’t even noticed the cigarettes and webegan kissing and feeling each other up. I played. I restacked the xeroxes, weighted them down with Gillespie's Mrs. Eliza Haywood, and decided to get Fanny Burney and her Evelina out of the library.I just left my stuff on the table, walked downstairs, dropped Gillespie's volume into the book return, got the two books, and returned to the seminar. For some strange reason, my things were still there and no corpse had materialized.I opened Evelina to Letter VI of Volume II and read: "Let not my Evelina be depreffed by a ftroke of fortune for. I wanted to get closer but her stomach made it impossible so we leaned in as best we could and continued to kiss and hold each other then we pulled apart, she had tears welled up in her eyes.I looked at her with concern,"What's the matter", I asked.She just shook her head and tightened her face to keep from busting out. She took my hand then turned to get onto the bed and I followed her as she crawled to the middle then laid down.I laid down and pulled myself to her and pressed my body to hers.