the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few minutes had
proved irresistible.

Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the
absence of the nurse. He very soon fell into a dream, which began
quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams
are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing,
terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him,
fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at
the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or
rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their
lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters of
some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage through
which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a slippery
sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a shallow
niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss below him
waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin the air
seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of Mont Blanc,
it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he remembered well
as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No, it was not Mont
Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits; it was Hecla
that he was climbing.

The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was
choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he
felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.

The room was full of smoke. He was gasping for breath, strangling in the
smothering oven which his chamber had become.

The house was on fire!

He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a
whisper. He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed
for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back
upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could
not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could
hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to
another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the fate
that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and then
burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young
persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes
wistf