"You have an open window, and a view of the sea," he remarked, and I
assented, and added that on such a morning these things were desirable.

Then his porridge came, and I proceeded with my toast and marmalade,
and the letter I had from you in Bombay, which lay beside my plate.
Your writing is never too legible, Berthalina, and my head and eyes
were aching, that morning, and I felt less rested than when I had gone
to bed. My limbs ached too, and while I looked at those crossed lines
of yours, without gathering the sense of what I read, I was wondering
if, in the broiling heat of this sultry weather, I had taken cold, and
was going to be laid up in this strange place, alone in a hotel. Have I
told you that, since the cramming for this last horrid exam. has sent
me, to an extent, off my mental equilibrium, I have a constant terror
of falling ill? It was that which had given me such a fit of horrors
when I saw my bedroom, the night before. Here, by the orders of a
peremptory doctor, for change of air and the sea-breeze, I find myself,
after vainly tramping the town for lodging, in a tiny back room of a
huge hotel, with a window which will only open two inches at the top,
and a ceiling and four walls crushing in on me like the lid and sides
of a coffin! For prospect, I have a window like my own, at about five
yards' distance, a few feet of red brick, and a leaden water-pipe!

If I were to be ill in this hole! The fear of it kept me awake and
feverish for hours; but falling asleep at last, I had the most vivid
and delicious dream. I felt myself irresistibly called by something--I
don't know what, the murmur of the sea, perhaps; and I thought I
escaped from that entombment, and walked in my night-gown down a long
corridor, to a door at the other side of the house. The door yielded,
in that ridiculous way in which all obstacles yield in dreams, and I
went through a room which I should know again among ten thousand rooms,
to the window--a big window thrown wide open; and through it the
sea--the sea--the sea! Such a sea! As effulgent, moon-silvered,
glorious, as we may look on in Paradise, Berthalina, if God hears the
"silly sailor-folk," as Kipling has undertaken that He will.

Ah! The sea, as revealed by the coffee-room window, sparkling in
sunshine, dotted with fishing-boats, the white bathing-machines
defining its margin, is but a vulgar thing, compared with the sea of my
dream.

"Do you believe in ghosts?" The man op