telegraphic thrill with which the brain will occasionally send an
invisible message of alarm from the seat of government to the
extremities; and as this smallest of all small bits of domestic gossip
did innocently escape me, the idle and good-natured reader will, I hope,
let me say out my little say upon the matter, in the next chapter.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CONCERNING THE TROUBLES AND THE SHAPES THAT BEGAN TO GATHER ABOUT DOCTOR
STURK.

It was just about that time that our friend, Dr. Sturk, had two or three
odd dreams that secretly acted disagreeably upon his spirits. His liver
he thought was a little wrong, and there was certainly a little light
gout sporting about him. His favourite 'pupton,' at mess, disagreed with
him; so did his claret, and hot suppers as often as he tried them, and
that was, more or less, nearly every night in the week. So he was,
perhaps, right, in ascribing these his visions to the humours, the
spleen, the liver, and the juices. Still they sat uncomfortably upon his
memory, and helped his spirits down, and made him silent and testy, and
more than usually formidable to poor, little, quiet, hard-worked Mrs.
Sturk.

Dreams! What talk can be idler? And yet haven't we seen grave people and
gay listening very contentedly at times to that wild and awful sort of
frivolity; and I think there is in most men's minds, sages or zanies, a
secret misgiving that dreams may have an office and a meaning, and are
perhaps more than a fortuitous concourse of symbols, in fact, the
language which good or evil spirits whisper over the sleeping brain.

There was an ugly and ominous consistency in these dreams which might
have made a less dyspeptic man a little nervous. Tom Dunstan, a sergeant
whom Sturk had prosecuted and degraded before a court-martial, who owed
the doctor no good-will, and was dead and buried in the church-yard
close by, six years ago, and whom Sturk had never thought about in the
interval--made a kind of resurrection now, and was with him every night,
figuring in these dreary visions and somehow in league with a sort of
conspirator-in-chief, who never showed distinctly, but talked in
scoffing menaces from outside the door, or clutched him by the throat
from behind his chair, and yelled some hideous secret into his ear,
which his scared and scattered wits, when he started into consciousness,
could never collect again. And this fellow, with whose sneering
cavernous talk--with whose very kno