ing
and bewildering dreams. In his slumbers he saw an immense cathedral,
lighted only by what seemed some great conflagration without, which,
glaring in, with horrid, crimson hue upon the pictured walls, gave the
place the strange, lurid aspect of Pandemonium. The effect was
heightened by the appearance of thousands of small, grotesque beings,
all bearing more or less resemblance to the little man of the clock,
who were flying and bobbing, jerking and grinning through the air,
beneath the great vault, as if madly revelling in the scene. Yet the
good man all the while had a vague sense of some awful, impending
calamity, which increased as he wandered around in great perplexity,
exploring the countenances of the various groups scattered over the
place.

Once he stumbled over a dead body and found it the corpse of the
invalid in the room above. He seemed to himself to be lifting it
carefully, when a lady, fair and stately, in rich, sweeping garments,
took the burden from his arms, and, sinking with it on the floor,
kissed it tenderly and then bent over it with a look of intense
sorrow.

Farther on he saw Mr. and Mrs. Dubois, with Adele, kneeling
imploringly, with terror-stricken faces, before a representation of
the Virgin Mary and her divine boy. Then the glare of light in the
building increased. Rushing to the entrance to look for the cause of
it, he there met Mrs. McNab coming towards him with a wild, disordered
countenance,--her white cotton headgear floating out like a banner to
the breeze,--shaking a brandy bottle in the faces of all she met. He
gained the door and found himself enwrapped in a sheet of flame.

Suddenly the whole scene passed. He woke. A glorious September sun was
irradiating the walls of his bedroom. He heard the movements of the
family below, and rose hastily.

A few moments of thought and prayer sufficed to clear his healthy
brain of the fantastic forms and scenes which had invaded it, and he
was himself again, ready and panting for service.

CHAPTER III.

MR. NORTON.

In order to bring Mr. Norton more distinctly before the reader, it is
necessary to give a few particulars of his previous life.

He was the son of a New England farmer. His father had given him a
good moral and religious training and the usual common school
education, but, being poor and having a large family to provide for,
he had turned him adrift upon the sea of life, to shape his own course
and win his own for