st on that of his fellow-prisoner. The little captive slept deep and
heavy, as was evinced from his breathing; and upon listening a moment,
Julian became again certain, either that his companion was the most
artful of ventriloquists and of dissemblers, or that there was actually
within the precincts of that guarded chamber, some third being, whose
very presence there seemed to intimate that it belonged not to the
ordinary line of humanity.

Julian was no ready believer in the supernatural; but that age was very
far from being so incredulous concerning ghostly occurrences as our
own; and it was no way derogatory to his good sense, that he shared the
prejudices of his time. His hair began to bristle, and the moisture to
stand on his brow, as he called on his companion to awake, for Heaven's
sake.

The dwarf answered--but he spoke without awaking.--"The day may dawn
and be d--d. Tell the master of the horse I will not go to the hunting,
unless I have the little black jennet."

"I tell you," said Julian, "there is some one in the apartment. Have you
not a tinder-box to strike a light?"

"I care not how slight my horse be," replied the slumberer, pursuing
his own train of ideas, which, doubtless, carried him back to the green
woods of Windsor, and the royal deer-hunts which he had witnessed there.
"I am not overweight--I will not ride that great Holstein brute, that
I must climb up to by a ladder, and then sit on his back like a
pin-cushion on an elephant."

Julian at length put his hand to the sleeper's shoulder, and shook him,
so as to awake him from his dream; when, after two or three snorts and
groans, the dwarf asked peevishly, what the devil ailed him?

"The devil himself, for what I know," said Peveril, "is at this very
moment in the room here beside us."

The dwarf on this information started up, crossed himself, and began
to hammer a flint and steel with all despatch, until he had lighted a
little piece of candle, which he said was consecrated to Saint Bridget,
and as powerful as the herb called _fuga daemonum_, or the liver of the
fish burnt by Tobit in the house of Raguel, for chasing all goblins, and
evil or dubious spirits, from the place of its radiance; "if, indeed,"
as the dwarf carefully guarded his proposition, "they existed anywhere,
save in the imagination of his fellow-prisoner."

Accordingly, the apartment was no sooner enlightened by this holy
candle's end, than Julian began to doubt the evide