Another dream invites you; but it must be sketched with more reticence, and this for two reasons. In the first place, the subject has become identified with that portion of theatrical entertainments usually found to be the least soporific. In the second place, if your imagination were encouraged to free range hereupon, you might be foolish enough to connect its poetic motion and its charm with certain souvenirs of a certain fair friend of yours, whom it were wiser to forget if you desire to profit by this Mandragorean system. Briefly, then, I commend a Ballet, as not altogether unworthy of trial—but not, be it observed, that thing of gas lamps, and pink tights, and leers, and poses plastiques, over which young America goes into raptures. By no means. Picture to yourself a smooth sward beneath clustered pines, a tender moonlight, and Nymphs—not semi-nude as is the fashion of our day, neither affecting the contortions of the gymnast as in our modern caricature of dancing—but robed in swansdown, with nodding plumes and tasseled fuschias pendent, tripping it, if you will, on "light fantastic toe," yet through stately and solemn measures. You remember Giulio Romano's dance of Apollo and the Muses in the Pitti at Florence? Take that for your model; then place the figures to your liking. Nor forget to add an orchestra of Æolian harps. Let them hang among the pine-branches, and sigh forth Weber's Last Waltz, just to set the groups in motion. Then fail not in your breathings, O soft night-wind; foot it daintily, ye wildwood Nymphs—so may sleep steal gently upon the restless one, while yet his ear and eye are unsated!

Another dream: blue water again, though, this time, with a golden beach. It is calm; but the surf rolls in languidly, with low murmurous sound, as it will roll, be the sea's surface never so smooth, beyond the involuntary breakers. What graceful bends and curves are marked, for an instant, with frothy pencil, upon the shining sands! How they sparkle with evanescent light! How soon the tiny bubbles disappear! But you have watched all this, many and many a time; and stale indeed hereon were description and moralizing! Why, then, this present allusion? What is there in it, tending to lull the acuter sensibilities? What offers it of gently-soothing exercise to the overwrought and throbbing brain? This is the reply. Popular belief gives to every ninth or tenth wave, tumbling in upon the shore, supremacy over its fellows. It swells up into fuller volume. It sweeps landward with a more majestic force. This is the story; but I would have you test its correctness. Is it the ninth, or the tenth? So, lie down yonder upon the mass of dry sea-weed piled against the rocks, and count patiently a dozen, a score, a hundred, a thousand waves as they come in. You shall tell me, to-morrow morning, whether the ninth have it, or the tenth—whether there be any regularity at all.

Again: if we do not, like the Roman Augurs, watch and interpret the flight of birds as of good or evil omen, some of them—I mean some of the birds, not of the Augurs—may help us to become, for a while, independent of fate and fortune. Did you ever, for instance, sit at a window on a summer's evening, and take note how a flight of swallows skims the air? They are not very numerous, perhaps; but as they dart to and fro, and cross and recross before you, their number appears indefinite, and the zigzag peculiarity of their movements can only be verified by the closest possible scrutiny. I have satisfied myself that the motion is regular, and that it describes an elongated figure of 8, traced as I am sure you have often traced it upon ice with the outer edge of your skates. Now, though I tell you this on the faith of my own personal observation, you are not bound to accept my word for it. Dream therefore that, while you are blending two ovals into one figure upon the frozen pond, swallows overhead are keeping time to your gyrations. The winter sport and the summer bird may be made to harmonize, as it is only in a dream; and close watching will enable you hereafter to support or disavow my theory.

Again: return, if you please, from air to water, for you have by no means exhausted the resources of this latter element, in the way of material for dreams. Are you an angler? Did you never drowse and doze over your rod, when "sitting in a pleasant shade," on a sultry afternoon, not a nibble disturbed the equanimity of your float? The mere thought were suggestive of a nap—suggestive, that is, to the indolently disposed, with whom however you may not be classed, seeing that your mind is in a state of unwholesome excitement, the which it is my business to allay. And so, I pray you, look deeper into this matter; pry down into the blue transparent depths, and mark the fish that swarm about your hook. Is it paste thereon, or a wriggling worm? Never mind; the bait is singularly attractive. To say nothing of the float gently bobbing ever and anon, and of the tell-tale ripples rising to the surface, you can see with your own eyes how victims dally with temptation; how they course to and fro, and round and round; how one eyes the bait, and another smells it, and another mumbles it; how one swims away, and presently returns, and with him his mate in size and colour. Are they over-fed or over-cautious, that they thus play round, but will not gorge? Does one egg on his brother to try the suspicious morsel, hoping himself to profit by his brother's experience? Is there so much resemblance to human foibles discernible down there, among these poor little inhabitants of the waters under the Earth? The question is worth studying out—especially by a sleepless man, who, while contemplating the forms, the motions, the manners, and the minds of fish, may unconsciously swallow the bait that is thus dropped before him.

It was my intention to devote a long and distinct paragraph to each of four other subjects, that appear to me no less adapted for the consideration of waking dreamers. These are, respectively, Ghosts, Labyrinths, Regattas, and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne. But it is well to leave something to the reader's perspicacity and inventive powers. Indeed, why should he not fancy—dream is the more appropriate term—that he himself has undertaken to complete these special paragraphs? Let his imaginary pen glide, swift and effortless, over his imaginary foolscap. Ten to one, he will fill in and elaborate my outlines, far better than I could work them out myself. For instance, I do but mention Ghosts; he might summon to his presence, and bid troop before him, hosts upon hosts of his friends or relatives, or of his chosen heroes and heroines in romance and history. He might clothe them in white or in grey; he might attire them in their ordinary habiliments; in short, he might parade them according to his own taste, without reference to mine, which whould be a clear point in his favour. Accidentally, I might call up some spirit that had vexed and thwarted him through life, for no man whose experience is worth remembering hath not had his enemies, hidden or revealed, and very few are the men, fewer the women, who have never disposed of a rival. My reader of the moment, invested with my functions, will of course evoke none but his familiars, the well-bred and well-behaved. Let me be grateful accordingly that, by transferring the responsibility to him, I escape the chance of bringing forward, innocently and inopportunely, some social Banquo. And so I pass on, with one single word of caution to my substitute in completing this paragraph: let him not convert his pen into a Pre-Raphaelitish paint-brush. Airy beings must be rather hinted than described. The realism of anatomical plates, applied to them, would spoil the reader's dream in toto, and wake him up perhaps more hopelessly than ever.—As to Labyrinths, the course is obvious. Take a dozen of these quaint contrivances, and place them side by side, as Paulsen or Paul Morphy may place the sundry chess-boards whereat he is to play, simultaneously and blindfolded, an equivalent number of games. Pop, over the hedges and into the very core of each one, any personage against whom you have a grudge, or any one of the Ghosts just convened that may have been troublesome; and then challenge the incarcerated individuals to find their way out of limbo, by the gravelled pathways. Should one of the whole number emerge, through extraordinary good luck, quietly tip him back again over the hedge, or defy him to retrace his steps and regain the centre. You may enlarge this suggestion, I think, into a paragraph reasonably long.—The same with Regattas. I am almost sorry that I gave up to you so felicitous a topic; for all ages and all waters may be laid under contribution. From Noah's Ark shall float the commodore's broad pendant. The ocean shall be covered, so far as eye can range, with countless craft of every build and rig. And all shall glide about in quiet, inasmuch as oars shall be muffled, and steamers, having learned to consume their own smoke, shall be taught equally to swallow their hideous noises. The marshalling of the competitors and the order of the racing are left to your discretion; but there need be no lack of interest. Caiques from Stamboul and gondolas from Venice shall be frequent; and pirogues from the Malayan peninsula shall over-haul the three trim yacht-schooners that raced across the Atlantic from New-York. Here Cleopatra's barge shall be matched against an Esquimaux kayak; there a catamaran from Coringa shall bump the Yale College eight. If you cannot make something out of all this picturesque confusion, and if you cannot contrive to lose therein both yourself and the reader of your paragraph, the fault will be yours, not mine.—There remain the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne. What are you to do with them? Simply this. Endow each one of them with personal attributes; let each have form and features, distinct from the others of her sisterhood. Is the task difficult? So much the better. After a cool thousand or so of these individual portraitures, you may begin to fumble in vain for separate identities. In fact, who knows whether you may not be compelled to take refuge hopelessly in sleep, the very mark at which both of us are aiming?

And now, the foregoing long and subdivided paragraph being brought at last to an end, it were disingenuous to shirk an admission, that the "who's who" is not so plainly discernible therein as it might be. You and I, and the reader and the writer, and the giver and recipient of advice, will be accused by the critic of being somewhat queerly mixed up. What, then? Are not vagueness and uncertainty of style specially appropriate to the circumstances? Who would thank us for precision? No, no; carry clearness, if you like, into your mathematical definitions; but leave us our mistiness when we treat of the mysterious. Nor, on the whole, am I otherwise than content with my suggested assumption of temporary and imaginary authorship, as one of the methods for quieting a fevered brain. How pleasant to dream that rival Publishers are contending for your manuscript poems; that rival Managers are waylaying you for a sight of your unwritten comedy! Besides, by adding authorship to the list that closed with the damsels of Cologne, the number is brought up to eleven, so that, when I wind up with my trump card, the promised dozen of dreams will be complete, and I shall be enabled to dispense with the "waves of shadow" on the wheat-field, which I acknowledged were not my original conception.

But am I too late in bringing forward my last and happiest idea?—though for that matter, when the tale of Mazeppa was concluded, "the King had been an hour asleep," and yet Mazeppa's story was told out ne'ertheless. For your immediate purpose therefore, or for use on your next sleepless night, I entrust you with the crowning opiate. Recollect that you are dreaming; and dream that all your intimates and relatives, all of whom you have ever heard or read with interest, men and women and children, people of every age and clime—imagine them, I say, all seated before you at a round table. How any table is to accommodate so vast a multitude, is their affair, and yours; the dreamer is never baulked by technical impediments. Have your eye upon them all at once—another little difficulty, to be overcome only by mortals in the incipient stage of somnolency. Or, if your mind's eye obstinately refuses to enlarge its orbit in this direction, so as to embrace such a vast and heterogeneous assemblage, gather, I beseech you, into one focus any such crowd as you habitually see. The Sunday audience of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher will answer the purpose; or you may fancy yourself at one of the old Tammany Hall Meetings; or at the Opera, on a fashionable night; or in the Senate at Washington during the impeachment of Mr. Johnson. It matters not when and where; but the proceedings strike you as insufferably dull, and you give vent to your feelings in a yawn that may neither be suppressed nor concealed. Suddenly, moved by the same impulse and unable also to control or hide its effect, the jaw of every soul present is dropped to the lowermost, and all mouths are open in a universal yawn. It is not catching; it is caught. Beecher gapes, and the elect are gaping round him. Isaiah Rynders the same, and the same with his "unterrified" hearers. Parepa-Rosa stands open-mouthed in dumb show of singing, while humming-birds perched on chignons vibrate, as they vainly try to resist the irresistible. Gape the Republicans, and gape the Democrats, in response to the gaping Butler on his legs. There is, in Shakespeare's words—though his ignorant editors have transformed it into a "gap"—there is, I say, "a gape in Nature." Will you alone hold out: I can't believe it. You have yawned in concert, I am morally certain. Indeed, if, as these long-drawn prescriptions come to an end, you be not far on the road to forgetfulness, I can give you but one parting counsel. Nothing else can serve and save you—you must incontinently take morphine.

DOCTOR PABLO'S PREDICTION.

Doctor Pablo went back a lonely man, to his old mother, in France, after having passed twenty years in the Philippines.—
English magazine.