ve
an unsatisfactory turn to his thoughts. It took place on the eventful
night of the tempest.

If some people saw visions that night, others dreamed dreams. In a
midnight storm like this, time was when the solemn peal and defiant
clang of the holy bells would have rung out confusion through the winged
hosts of 'the prince of the powers of the air,' from the heights of the
abbey tower. Everybody has a right to his own opinion on the matter.
Perhaps the prince and his army are no more upon the air on such a night
than on any other; or that being so, they no more hastened their
departure by reason of the bells than the eclipse does by reason of the
beating of the Emperor of China's gongs. But this I aver, whatever the
cause, upon such nights of storm, the sensoria of some men are crossed
by such wild variety and succession of images, as amounts very nearly to
the Walpurgis of a fever. It is not the mere noise--other noises won't
do it. The air, to be sure, is thin, and blood-vessels expand, and
perhaps the brain is pressed upon unduly. Well, I don't know. Material
laws may possibly account for it. I can only speak with certainty of the
phenomenon. I've experienced it; and some among those of my friends who
have reached that serene period of life in which we con over our
ailments, register our sensations, and place ourselves upon regimens,
tell me the same story of themselves. And this, too, I know, that upon
the night in question, Mr. Paul Dangerfield, who was not troubled either
with vapours or superstitions, as he lay in his green-curtained bed in
the Brass Castle, had as many dreams flitting over his brain and voices
humming and buzzing in his ears, as if he had been a poet or a
pythoness.

He had not become, like poor Sturk before his catastrophe, a dreamer of
dreams habitually. I suppose he did dream. The beasts do. But his
visions never troubled him; and I don't think there was one morning in a
year on which he could have remembered his last night's dream at the
breakfast-table.

On this particular night, however, he did dream. _Vidit somnium_. He
thought that Sturk was dead, and laid out in a sort of state in an open
coffin, with a great bouquet on his breast, something in the continental
fashion, as he remembered it in the case of a great, stern, burly
ecclesiastic in Florence. The coffin stood on tressels in the aisle of
Chapelizod church; and, of all persons in the world, he and Charles
Nutter stood side by