ff, that drew near, and passed within a few
streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it had arisen. This,
too, was as a reminiscence.

I rose and lifted a corner of the blind. Over the black belt of the
garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a
lighted window. How often before had my nurse lifted me out of bed and
pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there also, there
were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were
signs of those that waited like us for the morning.

I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well of
the staircase. For what cause I know not, just as it used to be in the
old days that the feverish child might be the better served, a peep of
gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me. But where I was, all was
darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking of the clock that
came ceaselessly up to my ear.

The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on
the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all
night through, I waited and longed of old. It was my custom, as the
hours dragged on, to repeat the question, "When will the carts come in?"
and repeat it again and again until at last those sounds arose in the
street that I have heard once more this morning. The road before our
house is a great thoroughfare for early carts. I know not, and I never
have known, what they carry, whence they come, or whither they go. But I
know that, long ere dawn, and for hours together, they stream
continuously past, with the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the
same clink of horses' feet. It was not for nothing that they made the
burthen of my wishes all night through. They are really the first
throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to
hear them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a
hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude. They have the
freshness of the daylight life about them. You can hear the carters
cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their horses or to one
another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter
comes up to you through the darkness. There is now an end of mystery and
fear. Like the knocking at the door in _Macbeth_,[33] or the cry of the
watchman in the _Tour de Nesle_, they show that the horrible caesura is
over and the nightmares have fled away, because the day