mess room on fire. One of our men, who was lying close by me, got up
and crawled to the window, but he was shot down the moment he showed
himself. I was hesitating whether to do the same or to lie still and be
smothered, when suddenly I rolled the dead Sepoy off, crawled into
the anteroom half suffocated by smoke, raised the lid of a very heavy
trapdoor, and stumbled down some steps into a place, half storehouse
half cellar, under the mess room. How I knew about it being there I
don't know. The trap closed over my head with a bang. That is all I
remember.'

"'Well, Charley, curiously enough my dream was also about an
extraordinary escape from danger, lasting, like yours, only a minute
or two. The first thing I remember--there seems to have been some thing
before, but what, I don't know--I was 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 c