she had had on a former occasion, that I concluded at once she was in
one of her trances. But having often heard that persons in such a
condition ought not to be disturbed, and feeling quite sure she knew
best how to manage herself, I turned, though reluctantly, and left the
lone cottage behind me in the night, with the death-like woman lying
motionless in the midst of it.

I found my way home without any further difficulty, and went to bed,
where I soon fell asleep, thoroughly wearied, more by the mental
excitement I had been experiencing, than by the amount of bodily
exercise I had gone through.

My sleep was tormented with awful dreams; yet, strange to say, I awoke
in the morning refreshed and fearless. The sun was shining through the
chinks in my shutters, which had been closed because of the storm, and
was making streaks and bands of golden brilliancy upon the wall. I had
dressed and completed my preparations long before I heard the steps of
the servant who came to call me.

What a wonderful thing waking is! The time of the ghostly moonshine
passes by, and the great positive sunlight comes. A man who dreams, and
knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is; but knows it
so little that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim
change in his dream for an awaking. When the true waking comes at last,
he is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality. So, likewise,
one who, in the darkness, lies waiting for the light about to be struck,
and trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the
light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up before him,
seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all
his imagining. He feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite