to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has
been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel,
awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of
daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys! it is morning.
The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and some one will
come to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable gives him
strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come
nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is
extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned out the gas; the last
servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to
bring him any help.

I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches
only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to
open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to
savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy
upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but
an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return
to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned without the least
effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever outgrown; and had come
under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of
my great-uncle's pulling my curls, which was effectually dispelled on the
day--the dawn of a new era to me--on which they were finally cropped from
my head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep; I remembered it again
immediately I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my
great-uncle's fingers; still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the
whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.

Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman
would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain