her listener. Then she turned to him, commandingly, and said:

"Thy dreams now, indeed, are oracles, more true than living Vala could
charm with the wand and the rune: Unfold them."

Thus adjured, Harold resumed:

"Methought, then, that I was on a broad, level plain, in the noon of
day; all was clear to my eye, and glad to my heart. I was alone and
went on my way rejoicing. Suddenly the earth opened under my feet,
and I fell deep, fathom-deep;--deep, as if to that central pit, which
our heathen sires called Niffelheim--the Home of Vapour--the hell of
the dead who die without glory. Stunned by the fall, I lay long,
locked as in a dream in the midst of a dream. When I opened my eyes,
behold, I was girt round with dead men's bones; and the bones moved
round me, undulating, as the dry leaves that wirble round in the winds
of the winter. And from midst of them peered a trunkless skull, and
on the skull was a mitre, and from the yawning jaws a voice came
hissing, as a serpent's hiss, 'Harold, the scorner, thou art ours!'
Then, as from the buzz of an army, came voices multitudinous, 'Thou
art ours!' I sought to rise, and behold my limbs were bound, and the
gyves were fine and frail, as the web of the gossamer, and they
weighed on me like chains of iron. And I felt an anguish of soul that
no words can speak--an anguish both of horror and shame; and my
manhood seemed to ooze from me, and I was weak as a child new born.
Then suddenly there rushed forth a freezing wind, as from an air of
ice, and the bones from their whirl stood still, and the buzz ceased,
and the mitred skull grinned on me still and voiceless; and serpents
darted their arrowy tongues from the eyeless sockets. And, lo, before
me stood (O Hilda, I see it now!) the form of the spectre that had