It would be as unprofitable as impossible to follow the ever-varying images of a dream, which, apparently consumed the best part of a century; every half hour of which had its separate distress, although the actual period of time passed did not reach ten minutes, to such singular and enormous expansion was the imagination swollen. The few placid moments distorted into numberless years of terror, like the drop of seemingly pure water, resolved, by microscopic power, into an ocean of repulsive monsters.
Dan had just been very properly condemned to death for the five and twentieth time, and had waited in gasping dread for the infliction of some inconceivable—except under such circumstances—mode of bodily torture, when he heard a tremendous noise, like the explosion of an immense piece of ordnance, close by his side. With a nervous start, that benumbed his frame like a powerful shock, he awoke, bathed in perspiration and half dead with fright. The sound was repeated. It was a simple, single, hesitating little knock at the chamber-door.
"Who's there?" he stammered, scarcely yet aroused to the consciousness of his identity.
"It's me, sir," replied a gentle voice, that thrilled through him with different sensations, for delight and joy stole over him like a sun-ray. It was his wife's.
"Come in, Peg," said he, "for an angel that you are. If it wasn't for this blessed interruption I'd have died in my bed with the wear an' tear of murdherin' bad dreams." He would fain have rushed into Peggy's arms as she entered, but the first attempt at making use of his continuations painfully reminded him that they belonged to somebody else. It also admonished him that it was necessary for him to support his new character with dignity.
"Well, ma'm," said he, "what do you mean by disturbin' me in this unprincipled way?"
"Indeed, sir," replied Peggy, timidly, "an' I'm a'most ashamed to tell you; it's that man o' mine over the way, sir; sure, I don't know what's come to him, at all, at all, within the last few hours."
"Ho! ho!" thought Dan, he's had a quare time of it as well as myself. "What's the matter with him, Mrs. Duffy?"
"That's what I want to know, sir, av anybody'd only tell me; I never knew him to kick up such tanthrums ever since we come together; musha! sure, an' the devil's in him if ever he enthered a mortal body, this blessed day—an' dhrink! murdher alive, sir, av he wouldn't dhrink the say dhry av he only had the swally, I'm not here."
"That's bad, very bad, indeed," said the other, oracularly. "People should never indulge in such terrible propensities," he went on, with a bold attempt at Bulworthy's phraseology.