of dust as lightly as a leaf is
whirled onward through the air. All objects fled as I advanced, and
each moment increased the velocity of my flight.

A vast forest extended its gloomy arms athwart the horizon; but did not
arrest my aerial journey. The thick boughs groaned and crashed beneath
me, as I was dragged through their matted foliage; my limbs lacerated
and torn, and my hair tangled amid the thorny branches. Vainly I
endeavoured to cling to the twigs which impeded my passage, but they
eluded my frenzied grasp, or snapped in my hands, while my cries for
help were drowned in the thundering sweep of the mighty gale.
Onward--onward. I was still flying onward without the aid of wings.
There seemed no end to that interminable flight.

At length, when I least expected a change, I was suddenly cast to the
bottom of a deep pit. The luxury of repose to my wounded and exhausted
frame, was as grateful and refreshing as the dews of heaven to the long
parched earth. I lay in a sort of pleasing helplessness, too glad to
escape from past perils to imagine a recurrence of the same evil.

While dreamily watching the swallows, tending their young in the holes
of the sandy bank that formed the walls of my prison, I observed the
sand at the bottom of the pit caught up in little eddies and whirling
round and round. A sickening feeling of dread stole over me, and I
crouched down in an agony of fear, and clung with all my strength to
the tufts of thorny shrubs which clothed the sides of the pit.

Again the wind-fiend caught me up on his broad pinions, and I was once
more traversing with lightning speed the azure deserts of air. A
burning heat was in my throat--my eyes seemed bursting from their
sockets; confused sounds were murmuring in my ears, and the very
blackness of darkness swallowed me up. No longer carried upward, I was
now rapidly descending from some tremendous height. I stretched forth
my hands to grasp some tangible substance in order to break the horrors
of that fall, but all above, around, and beneath me, was empty
air;--the effort burst the chains of that ghastly slumber, and I awoke
with a short stifled cry of terror, exclaiming with devotional fervour,
"Thank God! it is only a dream!"

The damp dews stood in large drops upon my brow, my hands were tightly
clenched, and every hair upon my head seemed stiffened and erect with
fear.

"Thank God!" I once more exclaimed in an agony of gratitude, "it is
only a dream!"