malady of
not wanting, my evangelist." But methought he sighed as he mounted again
into the chaise.

All day long we journeyed in the same miserable weather: the mist
besetting us closely, the heavens incessantly weeping on my head. The
road lay over moorish hills, where was no sound but the crying of
moor-fowl in the wet heather and the pouring of the swollen burns.
Sometimes I would doze off in slumber, when I would find myself plunged
at once in some foul and ominous nightmare, from the which I would awake
strangling. Sometimes, if the way was steep and the wheels turning
slowly, I would overhear the voices from within, talking in that
tropical tongue which was to me as inarticulate as the piping of the
fowls. Sometimes, at a longer ascent, the Master would set foot to
ground and walk by my side, mostly without speech. And all the time,
sleeping or waking, I beheld the same black perspective of approaching
ruin; and the same pictures rose in my view, only they were now painted
upon hill-side mist. One, I remember, stood before me with the colours
of a true illusion. It showed me my lord seated at a table in a small
room; his head, which was at first buried in his hands, he slowly
raised, and turned upon me a countenance from which hope had fled. I saw
it first on the black window-panes, my last night in Durrisdeer; it
haunted and returned upon me half the voyage through; and yet it was no
effect of lunacy, for I have come to a ripe old age with no decay of my
intelligence; nor yet (as I was then tempted to suppose) a heaven-sent
warning of the future, for all manner of calamities befell, not that
calamity--and I saw many pitiful sights, but never that one.

It was decided we should travel on all night; and it was singular, once
the dusk had fallen, my spirits somewhat rose. The bright lamps, shining
forth into the mist and on the smoking horses and the hodding post-boy,
gave me perhaps an outlook intrinsically more cheerful than what day had
shown; or perhaps my mind had become wearied of its melancholy. At least
I spent some waking hours, not without satisfaction in my thoughts,
although wet and weary in my body; and fell at last into a natural
slumber without dreams. Yet I must have been at work even in the deepest
of my sleep; and at work with at least a measure of intelligence. For I
started broad awake, in the very act of crying out to myself

"Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child."

stricken