Who could it be? I was about to strike a light to satisfy my curiosity, though I had but little doubt it was my friend of the previous evening, when the sleeper, to my surprise, began talking in his sleep; and my ill-favoured friend, it seemed, was dumb.
My hand was arrested in the act of striking a light, as the speaker began talking loud and fast and in a very peculiar strain. I was curious to hear more of his conversation; accordingly I refrained at present from striking a light, as the sound might awaken him, and listened attentively.
I wondered much what could be the subject of the sleeper's dream. I grew more and more puzzled at his words. It is impossible for me to give you one hundredth part of his conversation here, even if time permitted; for his utterance was so rapid that he would have outstripped any shorthand writer.
Some part of his strange colloquy, however, I have retained, as I fancied that in it I found reference to myself.
"Fools!" he cried with vehemence; "I tell you the prize is sure. I have him in my power, he cannot escape me. Ye who prize blood rather than gold, make ready the chasm to receive him. He is one of those fools who delight in danger, and he will follow me. What think ye? He seeks chasms and grottoes for the insane pleasure of burdening himself with the dross which we beings of a higher order tread under foot. Crystals, fossils, shining stones, the ore of different metals, especially gold and such trumpery, are trifles that his mind (if such it may be called) revels in.
"Do you not believe me, my friends? Ha! ha! I wonder not at your disbelief; ye whose sublime philosophy is nourished in the peaceful bowels of the earth, and who are therefore unable to comprehend how there can exist an order of beings so totally degraded and so approaching the brute, nay, so far surpassing even the brutes themselves in the grossness of its appetites, as to yearn for the very stones which form the pavement and the walls of our subterranean palaces.
"Ye, my friends, who never issue from your cells to visit that outer world, because, forsooth, your eyesight is not formed by nature to endure the glare which illumines the surface of this globe, how is it possible that ye should believe that there exist without intelligences so stunted and depraved? But I tell you, my brothers in philosophy, that this fool belongs to a race of maniacs, who have long attempted to invade our peaceful shores, and even succeeded so far as to penetrate nearly to the roofs of our dwellings—let us be thankful that their frames are not suited to endure our genial element below—with much labour, and for the sole purpose of obtaining metal or some such rubbish out of which they form——
"Tush! I do but waste time in attempting to enumerate the countless uses to which these madmen turn our paving stones. When ye are more at leisure, if ye are content, I will relate to you some of the incredible absurdities of those insects which crawl upon the outward surface of our globe.
"At present, my brother gnomes, we have a great work before us; our wants must be satisfied, and we must adopt the means to satisfy them. We thirst for blood, and we must have it. This fool loves to feast his eyes upon gold, and gold he shall see by the stratum. He but barters his blood for gold, after the fashion of his own vile race. What else can he expect from us?
"It is not often, my friends, that we have a feast of blood. Only now and then when some stray traveller falls into a crevice or impudently approaches too near to the craters of Vesuvius and Etna, till he gets suffocated by the fumes and falls senseless into our maws.