e only seen one myself, but before long all the men will
have them.

Now why, you will want to know, do I trouble to write all this to you?
I am obliged to do it, because it has something to do with another
absurd trifle (as you will inevitably say), which in my present state
of rather unquiet fancy--nothing more, perhaps--I have to put down. It
is a dream, sir, which I am going to record, and I must say it is one
of the oddest I have had. Is there anything in it beyond what the
bagman's talk and Uncle Henry's disappearance could have suggested?
You, I repeat, shall judge: I am not in a sufficiently cool and
judicial frame to do so.

It began with what I can only describe as a pulling aside of curtains:
and I found myself seated in a place--I don't know whether in doors or
out. There were people--only a few--on either side of me, but I did
not recognize them, or indeed think much about them. They never spoke,
but, so far as I remember, were all grave and pale-faced and looked
fixedly before them. Facing me there was a Punch and Judy Show,
perhaps rather larger than the ordinary ones, painted with black
figures on a reddish-yellow ground. Behind it and on each side was
only darkness, but in front there was a sufficiency of light. I was
"strung up" to a high degree of expectation and listened every moment
to hear the panpipes and the Roo-too-too-it. Instead of that there
came suddenly an enormous--I can use no other word--an enormous single
toll of a bell, I don't know from how far off--somewhere behind. The
little curtain flew up and the drama began.

I believe someone once tried to re-write Punch as a serious tragedy;
but whoever he may have been, this performance would have suited him
exactly. There was something Satanic about the hero. He varied his
methods of attack: for some of his victims he lay in wait, and to see
his horrible face--it was yellowish white, I may remark--peering round
the wings made me think of the Vampyre in Fuseli's foul sketch. To
others he was polite and carneying--particularly to the unfortunate
alien who can only say _Shallabalah_--though what Punch said I never
could catch. But with all of them I came to dread the moment of death.
The crack of the stick on their skulls, which in the ordinary way
delights me, had here a crushing sound as if the bone was giving way,
and the victims quivered and kicked as they lay. The baby--it sounds
more ridiculous as I go on--the baby, I am sure, was aliv