lty to all my calculations
concerning him.

To all these conflicting doubts and difficulties sleep at last
succeeded. But better far for me it had not; for with it came dreams
such as sick men only experience: all the distorted images that rose
before my wandering faculties, mingling with the strange fragments of
Bubbleton's conversation, made a phantasmagoria the most perplexing
and incomprehensible; and which, even on waking, I could not banish, so
completely had Saladin and his pas seul, the guitar, the hookah, and the
suit of red emeralds taken hold of my erring intellect.

Candid, though not fair reader, have you ever been tipsy? Have you
ever gone so far over the boundaryline that separates the land of mere
sobriety from its neighboring territory, the country of irresponsible
impulses, that you actually doubted which was the way back,--that you
thought you saw as much good sense and good judgment on the one side of
the frontier as the other, with only a strong balance of good-fellowship
to induce a preference? If you know this state,--if you have taken the
precise quantum of champagne or moselle mousseux that induces it, and
yet goes no farther,--then do you perfectly understand all the trials
and difficulties of my waking moments, and you can appreciate the
arduous task I undertook in my effort to separate the real from the
imaginary, the true types from their counterfeits; in a word, the
wanderings of my own brain from those of Captain Bubbleton's.

In this agreeable and profitable occupation was I engaged; when the
same imposing tread and heavy footstep I had heard the previous evening
entered the adjoining room and approached my door. The lock turned, and
the illustrious captain himself appeared. And here let me observe,
that if grave censure be occasionally bestowed on persons who, by the
assumption of voice, look, or costume, seek to terrorize over infant
minds, a no less heavy sentence should be bestowed on all who lord it
over the frail faculties of sickness by any absurdity in their personal
appearance. And that I may not seem captious, let me describe my friend.
The captain, who was somewhere about the forties, was a full-faced,
chubby, good-looking fellow, of some five feet ten or eleven inches in
height; his countenance had been intended by nature for the expression
of such emotions as arise from the enjoyment of turtle, milk punch,
truffled turkeys, mulled port, mullagatawny, stilton, stout, and pic