sleep.

But, as he walked beneath the cloudless skies, beholding the stars,
affected perhaps by the purer air of night and the melancholy lapping
of the water, he fell into a reverie which brought him back by degrees
to sane moral thoughts. Reason at last dispersed completely his
momentary frenzy. The teachings of his education, its religious
precepts, but above all, so he told me, the remembrance of his simple
life beneath the parental roof drove out his wicked thoughts. When he
returned to the inn after a long meditation to which he abandoned
himself on the bank of the Rhine, resting his elbow on a rock, he
could, he said to me, not have slept, but have watched untempted
beside millions of gold. At the moment when his virtue rose proudly
and vigorously from the struggle, he knelt down, with a feeling of
ecstasy and happiness, and thanked God. He felt happy, light-hearted,
content, as on the day of his first communion, when he thought himself
worthy of the angels because he had passed one day without sinning in
thought, or word, or deed.

He returned to the inn and closed the window without fearing to make a
noise, and went to bed at once. His moral and physical lassitude was
certain to bring him sleep. In a very short time after laying his head
on his mattress, he fell into that first fantastic somnolence which
precedes the deepest sleep. The senses then grew numb, and life is
abolished by degrees; thoughts are incomplete, and the last quivering
of our consciousness seems like a sort of reverie. "How heavy the air
is!" he thought; "I seem to be breathing a moist vapor." He explained
this vaguely to himself by the difference which must exist between the
atmosphere of the close room and the purer air by the river. But
presently he heard a periodical noise, something like that made by