, when my last session shall have
closed, I shall be exactly where you are at present."

He ceased speaking, and there was a pause of several minutes. I felt
soothed and gratified. There was a sweet melancholy music in the tones
of his voice, that sunk to my very heart; and the confidence he reposed
in me flattered my pride. "How was it," I at length said, "that you were
the gayest in the party of last night?"

"I do not know that I can better answer you," he replied, "than by
telling you a singular dream which I had about the time of my father's
death. I dreamed that I had suddenly quitted the world, and was
journeying, by a long and dreary passage, to the place of final
punishment. A blue, dismal light glimmered along the lower wall of the
vault; and, from the darkness above, where there flickered a thousand
undefined shapes--things without form or outline--I could hear
deeply-drawn sighs, and long hollow groans and convulsive sobbings, and
the prolonged moanings of an unceasing anguish. I was aware, however,
though I knew not how, that these were but the expressions of a lesser
misery, and that the seats of severer torment were still before me. I
went on and on, and the vault widened, and the light increased, and the
sounds changed. There were loud laughters and low mutterings, in the
tone of ridicule; and shouts of triumph and exultation; and, in brief,
all the thousand mingled tones of a gay and joyous revel. Can these, I
exclaimed, be the sounds of misery when at the deepest? 'Bethink thee,'
said a shadowy form beside me--'bethink thee if it be not so on earth.'
And as I remembered that it was so, and bethought me of the mad revels
of shipwrecked seamen and of plague-stricken cities, I awoke. But on
this subject you must spare me."

"Forgive me," I said; "to-morrow I leave college, and not with the less
reluctance that I must part from you. But I shall yet find you occupying
a place among the _literati_ of our country, and shall remember, with
pride, that you were my friend."

He sighed deeply. "My hopes rise and fall with my spirits," he said;
"and to-night I am melancholy. Do you ever go to buffets with yourself,
Mr. Lindsay? Do you ever mock, in your sadder moods, the hopes which
render you happiest when you are gay? Ah! 'tis bitter warfare when a man
contends with Hope!--when he sees her, with little aid from the
personifying influence, as a thing distinct from himself--a lying spirit
that comes to flatter