not nightly jumble events and personages and times and
places, as these do daily? Are we not sometimes troubled by our own
sleeping inconsistencies, and do we not vexedly try to account for
them or excuse them, just as these do sometimes in respect of their
waking delusions? Said an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a
hospital like this, "Sir, I can frequently fly." I was half ashamed to
reflect that so could I--by night. Said a woman to me on the same
occasion, "Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her
Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our nightgowns, and
his Royal Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a
third on horseback in a Field-Marshal's uniform." Could I refrain from
reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal
parties I myself had given (at night), the unaccountable viands I had
put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conducting myself on
those distinguished occasions? I wonder that the great master who knew
everything, when he called Sleep the death of each day's life, did not
call Dreams the insanity of each day's sanity.

By this time I had left the Hospital behind me, and was again setting
towards the river; and in a short breathing space I was on
Westminster-bridge, regaling my houseless eyes with the external walls
of the British Parliament--the perfection of a stupendous institution,
I know, and the admiration of all surrounding nations and succeeding
ages, I do not doubt, but perhaps a little the better now and then for
being pricked up to its work. Turning off into Old Palace-yard, the
Courts of Law kept me company for a quarter of an hour; hinting in low
whispers what numbers of people they were keeping awake, and how
intensely wretched and horrible they were rendering the small hours to
unfortunate suitors. Westminster Abbey was fine gloomy society for
another quarter of an hour; suggesting a wonderful procession of its
dead among the dark arches and pillars, each century more amazed by
the century following it than by all the centuries going before. And
indeed in those houseless night walks--which even included cemeteries
where watchmen went round among the graves at stated times, and moved
the tell-tale handle of an index which recorded that they had touched
it at such an hour--it was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts
of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised
while the living slept, there