door having been left open.

"He is excited," I said in a low voice, for across the passage I could
hear him walking up and down in his own room; and that kept on till I
dropped off asleep, and dreamed that the French had landed with four
large boats and a great pole which they lowered down into the sea. Then
they seemed to have got me fastened to the rope that ran through the
wheel-block at the head, and they had fastened a pig of lead on to my
chest, which pressed upon me as they hauled me up out of the boat, and
then let go.

It was all wonderfully real. I felt myself suspended over the water,
which looked black as ink instead of lit up by the sun as it was when
Bigley went down. And as I hung there, the oppression from the pig of
lead was terrible, and it seemed to please Captain Gualtiere, who was
there in a boat opposite, giving orders and laughing at my struggles to
escape. "Now," I heard him say in his Frenchy English, "cease to hold
ze ropes, and laissez let him go."

Then there was a dull splash, and with the weight always upon me I
seemed to part the waters and go down, down, down, into the deep black
depths, which appeared to have no bottom. There was a growing sensation
of suffocation; my boots hurt my feet, and the blister I had made upon
my heel smarted, and all at once the pony, as it stood at the half-way
house door, kicked out at me, just as I was beginning to suffocate; and
this broke the rope, and I shot up to the surface.

In other words, I started up awake, to find that I had been lying on my
back, that I was bathed in perspiration, and that my father was still
walking up and down his bed-room.

"What stuff to go and dream!" I said to myself, as I felt very much
relieved. "That comes of eating cold beef and pickled cucumber for
supper."

I turned upon my side to settle myself off to sleep again; but I could
not doze off; and do what I would, the thought of being sent down into
the black water with a pig of our lead upon my chest, and the pony down
below ready to kick out at me kept haunting my mind, while across the
passage there was my father still keeping up the regular tramp.

Just then the clock at the bottom of the stairs began to strike, and I
thought that it must be a dark morning and about four, but to my
astonishment it struck eleven, and I felt sure that it must be wrong.

And all this while there was the restless pace up and down my father's
room, making the jug in the b