n.

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort;
indeed, his nights were for some while like other men's, now blank, now
chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes
appalling, but except for an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary
kind. I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what
makes my dreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the
first floor of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some poor efforts at
gentility, a carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall;
but, for all these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a
moorland place, among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He
looked down from the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have
been long disused. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world. There
was no sign of the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old,
brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in against the
wall of the house and seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog
disquieted the dreamer; it was quite a nameless feeling, for the beast
looked right enough--indeed, he was so old and dull and dusty and
broken-down, that he should rather have awakened pity; and yet the
conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was no proper dog at
all, but something hellish. A great many dozing summer flies hummed
about the yard; and presently the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly
in his open palm, carried it to his mouth like an ape, and looking
suddenly up at the dreamer in the window, winked to him with one eye.
The dream went on, it matters not how it went; it was a good dream as
dreams go; but there was nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish
brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies partly in that very
fact: that having found so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer
should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and fall back on
indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors. It would be different
now; he knows his business better!

For, to approach at last the point: This honest fellow had long been in
the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father
before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the
teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart
reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure
quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion. So that the litt