he red embers, into which
the principal part of the boughs to which they belonged had crumbled
away. Insensibly the legend of Aldobrand Oldenbuck, and his mysterious
visits to the inmates of the chamber, awoke in his mind, and with it,
as we often feel in dreams, an anxious and fearful expectation, which
seldom fails instantly to summon up before our mind's eye the object of
our fear. Brighter sparkles of light flashed from the chimney, with
such intense brilliancy as to enlighten all the room. The tapestry waved
wildly on the wall, till its dusky forms seemed to become animated. The
hunters blew their horns--the stag seemed to fly, the boar to resist,
and the hounds to assail the one and pursue the other; the cry of deer,
mangled by throttling dogs--the shouts of men, and the clatter of horses'
hoofs, seemed at once to surround him--while every group pursued, with
all the fury of the chase, the employment in which the artist had
represented them as engaged. Lovel looked on this strange scene devoid
of wonder (which seldom intrudes itself upon the sleeping fancy), but
with an anxious sensation of awful fear. At length an individual figure
among the tissued huntsmen, as he gazed upon them more fixedly, seemed
to leave the arras and to approach the bed of the slumberer. As he
drew near, his figure appeared to alter. His bugle-horn became a brazen
clasped volume; his hunting-cap changed to such a furred head-gear as
graces the burgomasters of Rembrandt; his Flemish garb remained but his
features, no longer agitated with the fury of the chase, were changed
to such a state of awful and stern composure, as might best portray the
first proprietor of Monkbarns, such as he had been described to Lovel
by his descendants in the course of the preceding evening. As this
metamorphosis took place, the hubbub among the other personages in the
arras disappeared from the imagination of the dreamer, which was now
exclusively bent on the single figure before him. Lovel strove to
interrogate this awful person in the form of exorcism proper for the
occasion; but his tongue, as is usual in frightful dreams, refused its
office, and clung, palsied, to the roof of his mouth. Aldobrand held up
his finger, as if to impose silence upon the guest who had intruded on
his apartment, and began deliberately to unclasp the venerable, volume
which occupied his left hand. When it was unfolded, he turned over the
leaves hastily for a short space, and then rai