'No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew
why this child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling
to retire. My aunts cried out upon the "spoiled child, the
most unreasonable child that ever was,--if brother could but
open his eyes to see it,--who was never willing to go to bed."
They did not know that, so soon as the light was taken away,
she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards her,
the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as
they came, till at last, when they were about to close upon
her, she started up with a shriek which drove them away, but
only to return when she lay down again. They did not know
that, when at last she went to sleep, it was to dream of
horses trampling over her, and to awake once more in fright;
or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees
that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could
not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over
her feet, and rose higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it
would reach her lips. No wonder the child arose and walked in
her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they
heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had
dreamed, her father sharply bid her "leave off thinking of
such nonsense, or she would be crazy,"--never knowing that he
was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night. Often
she dreamed of following to the grave the body of her mother,
as she had done that of her sister, and woke to find the
pillow drenched in tears. These dreams softened her heart too
much, and cast a deep shadow over her young days; for then,
and later, the life of dreams,--probably because there was in
it less to distract the mind from its own earnestness,--has
often seemed to her more real, and been remembered with more