his brain."

"Oh! I have not told you my dream,--if it was a dream. I am confused.
I am so delighted with the idea. We shall group no more in this hideous
darkness,--we shall have light,--plenty of light, I promise you. Odd we
did not think of the thing before!"

"But what is it, brother? What was your dream about?--Tell us that."

"Well, now that I am awake, I don't think it was a dream,--at least, not
a regular one. I was thinking of the thing before I fell asleep, and I
kept on thinking about it when I got to be half asleep; and then I saw
my way clearer. You know, brother, I have before told you that when I
have any thing upon my mind that puzzles me, I often hit upon the
solution of it when I am about half dreaming; and so it has been in this
case, I am sure I have got the right way at last."

"Well, Caspar,--the right way to do what? The right way to get out of
the cave?"

"I hope so, brother."

"But what do you propose?"

"I propose that we turn tallow-chandlers."

"Tallow-chandlers! Poor boy!" soliloquised Karl; "I thought as much. O
merciful Heaven, my dear brother! his reason is gone!"

Such were Karl's painful surmises, though he kept them to himself.

"Yes, tallow-chandlers," continued Caspar, in the same half-earnest,
half-jocular way, "and make us a full set of candles."

"And of what would you make your candles, dear Caspar?" inquired Karl,
in a sympathising tone, and with the design of humouring his brother,
rather than excite him by contradiction.

"Of what," echoed Caspar, "what but the fat of this great bear?"

"Ha!" ejaculated Karl, suddenly changing his tone, as he perceived that
Caspar's madness had something of method in it, "the fat of the bear,
you say?"

"Certainly, Karl. Isn't his stomach as full of tallow as it can stick?
and what's to hinder us to make candles out of it that will carry us all
over the cave,--and out of it, I fancy, unless it be the greatest maze
that Nature has ever made out of rock-work?"

Karl was no longer under the belief that his brother had gone mad. On
the contrary, he saw that the latter had conceived a very fine idea; and
though it did not yet appear how the thing was to be carried out, Karl
fancied that there was something in it. His sweet dream recurred to
him, and this he now regarded as ominous of the success of some plan of
escape,--perhaps by the very means which Caspar had suggested,--by
making candles out of "bear's grease!"