self in sleep.

He drank a quantity of wine after dinner, in vain. No such artificial
means would bring sleep to his eyes. His thoughts, more incoherent,
dragged him more unmercifully after them--as if a wretch, condemned to
such expiation, were drawn at the heels of wild horses. No oblivion, and
no rest.

How long he sat, drinking and brooding, and being dragged in imagination
hither and thither, no one could have told less correctly than he. But
he knew that he had been sitting a long time by candle-light, when he
started up and listened, in a sudden terror.

For now, indeed, it was no fancy. The ground shook, the house rattled,
the fierce impetuous rush was in the air! He felt it come up, and go
darting by; and even when he had hurried to the window, and saw what it
was, he stood, shrinking from it, as if it were not safe to look.

A curse upon the fiery devil, thundering along so smoothly, tracked
through the distant valley by a glare of light and lurid smoke, and
gone! He felt as if he had been plucked out of its path, and saved from
being torn asunder. It made him shrink and shudder even now, when its
faintest hum was hushed, and when the lines of iron road he could trace
in the moonlight, running to a point, were as empty and as silent as a
desert.

Unable to rest, and irresistibly attracted--or he thought so--to this
road, he went out, and lounged on the brink of it, marking the way the
train had gone, by the yet smoking cinders that were lying in its
track. After a lounge of some half hour in the direction by which it had
disappeared, he turned and walked the other way--still keeping to the
brink of the road--past the inn garden, and a long way down; looking
curiously at the bridges, signals, lamps, and wondering when another
Devil would come by.

A trembling of the ground, and quick vibration in his ears; a distant
shriek; a dull light advancing, quickly changed to two red eyes, and
a fierce fire, dropping glowing coals; an irresistible bearing on of a
great roaring and dilating mass; a high wind, and a rattle--another come
and gone, and he holding to a gate, as if to save himself!

He waited for another, and for another. He walked back to his former
point, and back again to that, and still, through the wearisome vision
of his journey, looked for these approaching monsters. He loitered about
the station, waiting until one should stay to call there; and when one
did, and was detached for water, he stood