on horseback, holding a very
pretty but awfully pale girl in front of me. We were pursued by a whole
troop of Sepoy cavalry, who were firing pistol-shots at us. We were not
more than seventy or eighty yards in front, and they were gaining fast,
just as I rode into a large deserted temple. In the center was a huge
stone figure. I jumped off my horse with the lady, and as I did so she
said, "blow out my brains, Edward; don't let me fall into their hands."

"'Instead of answering, I hurried her round behind the idol, pushed
against one of the leaves of a flower in the carving, and the stone
swung back, and showed a hole just large enough to get through, with a
stone staircase inside the body of the idol, made, no doubt, for the
priest to go up and give responses through the mouth. I hurried the girl
through, crept in after her, and closed the stone, just as our pursuers
came clattering into the courtyard. That is all I remember.'

"'Well, it is monstrously rum,' Charley said, after a pause. 'Did you
understand what the old fellow was singing about before he gave us the
pipes?'

"'Yes; I caught the general drift. It was an entreaty to Siva to give us
some glimpse of futurity which might benefit us.'

"We lit our cheroots and rode for some miles at a brisk canter without
remark. When we were within a short distance of home we reined up.

"'I feel ever so much better,' Charley said. 'We have got that opium out
of our heads now. How do you account for it all, Harley?'

"'I account for it in this way, Charley. The opium naturally had the
effect of making us both dream, and as we took similar doses of the same
mixture, under similar circumstances, it is scarcely extraordinary that
it should have effected the same portion of the brain, and caused a
certain similarity in our dreams. In all nightmares something terrible
happens, or is on the point of happening; and so it was here. Not
unnaturally in both our cases our thoughts turned to soldiers. If you
remember, there was a talk at mess some little time since as to what
would happen in the extremely unlikely event of the Sepoys mutinying in
a body. I have no doubt that was the foundation of both our dreams. It
is all natural enough when we come to think it over calmly. I think, by
the way, we had better agree to say nothing at all about it in the
regiment.'

"'I should think not,' Charley said. 'We should never hear the end of
it; they would chaff us out of our lives.'