d, in addition to
the reiterated quarters, four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes, with the
aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions
of torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a
sleepless night.

From that period the curse was milder, but the victims raged. They swam
on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the
weapons of black Insomnia's armoury and became her soldiery, doing her
will upon themselves. Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of
the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness. She is the fountain of
the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled
everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite
for change.

Dacier was never the best of sleepers. He had taken to exercise his
brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and
a reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of
the emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than
commonly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissipated, with
the difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury,
which he is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is
a point of vantage denied to them. Physically he had stout reserves, for
he had not disgraced the temple. His intemperateness lay in the craving
to rise and lead: a precocious ambition. This apparently modest
young man started with an aim--and if in the distance and with but a
slingstone, like the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his
energies were in his aim--at Government. He had hung on the fringe of
an Administration. His party was out, and he hoped for higher station on
its return to power. Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his
head; among them at present one sufficiently magnified and voracious
to swallow the remainder. He added force to the interrogation as to why
that Bell should sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why
he was there to hear it! A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have
enlightened him if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the peculiar
kind of sorcery issuing from that sex. He rather despised the power of
women over men: and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell,
instead of having obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter
were urgent. He had received letters at Lugano, summoning him home,
before he