ng the resolution to stoop and
take it up again; and insensibly overcome by the luxury of the silence,
the subdued light, and the warmth, I fell asleep.

I remained for some time lost in the sort of insensibility belonging to a
first sleep; at last some vague and broken sensations came over me. It
seemed to me that the day grew darker, that the air became colder. I half
perceived bushes covered with the scarlet berries which foretell the
coming of winter. I walked on a dreary road, bordered here and there with
juniper-trees white with frost. Then the scene suddenly changed. I was in
the diligence; the cold wind shook the doors and windows; the trees,
loaded with snow, passed by like ghosts; in vain I thrust my benumbed
feet into the crushed straw. At last the carriage stopped, and, by one of
those stage effects so common in sleep, I found myself alone in a barn,
without a fireplace, and open to the winds on all sides. I saw again my
mother's gentle face, known only to me in my early childhood, the noble
and stern countenance of my father, the little fair head of my sister,
who was taken from us at ten years old; all my dead family lived again
around me; they were there, exposed to the bitings of the cold and to the
pangs of hunger. My mother prayed by the resigned old man, and my sister,
rolled up on some rags of which they had made her a bed, wept in silence,
and held her naked feet in her little blue hands.

It was a page from the book I had just read transferred into my own
existence.

My heart was oppressed with inexpressible anguish. Crouched in a corner,
with my eyes fixed upon this dismal picture, I felt the cold slowly
creeping upon me, and I said to myself with bitterness:

"Let us die, since poverty is a dungeon guarded by suspicion, apathy, and
contempt, and from which it is vain to try to escape; let us die, since
there is no place for us at the banquet of the living!"

And I tried to rise to join my mother again, and to wait at her feet for
the hour of release.

This effort dispelled my dream, and I awoke with a start.

I looked around me; my lamp was expiring, the fire in my stove
extinguished, and my half-opened door was letting in an icy wind. I got
up, with a shiver, to shut and double-lock it; then I made for the
alcove, and went to bed in haste.

But the cold kept me awake a long time, and my thoughts continued the
interrupted dream.

The pictures I had lately accused of exaggeration now see