IT was long ere Mr Blair fell asleep that night, but exhausted nature at last sunk under the burden of reflection; and, for several hours, he lay buried in slumber as profound as had ever visited his eyelids.

He awoke, sitting bolt-upright in his bed, his hands clenched violently together, his night-cap off, his hair on end, and the sweat standing in big and palpable drops upon his forehead, and the sound of his own screaming voice in his ear. He clasped his brows, and staring wildly about him in the dim chamber, strove instinctively, rather than consciously, to retrace the outlines of what he now felt to be nothing but a dream, although he was still too much agitated with its delusions to be able to enjoy the sense of reality and repose. Everything, however, as he looked back, seemed to become darkened the moment his mental eye approached it;—every strong and distinct image seemed to vanish, and leave but a vapour behind it, and it was in vain he endeavoured to make out any consistent or intelligible notion of what had passed—although a sort of confused and distorted “cloudland” of terrible things still continued to lower above the whole surface of his imagination—The black river—the sob of his child—the water gushing into his eyes and ears, and then closing with a rushing sound over his head—the agony of mortal terror—the joy of sudden deliverance—the tears of joy—these had all been with him, and he felt that they had been with him as vividly as during the waking hours of the eventful day before. But other images had followed these, some of them as dark and as terrible, but the whole texture of which seemed now to elude the grasp of his remembrance.