the remainder
of his term.

Circumstances, however, occurred to prevent our putting this plan in
execution. My wife, meanwhile, was, if possible, more depressed and
nervous every day. The servants seemed to sympathise in the dread and
gloom which involved ourselves; the very children grew timid and
spiritless, without knowing why--and the entire house was pervaded with
an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. A poorhouse or a dungeon would
have been cheerful, compared with a dwelling haunted unceasingly with
unearthly suspicions and alarms. I would have made any sacrifice short of
ruin, to emancipate our household from the odious mental and moral
thraldom which was invisibly established over us--overcasting us with
strange anxieties and an undefined terror.

About this time my wife had a dream which troubled her much, although
she could not explain its supposed significance satisfactorily by any
of the ordinary rules of interpretation in such matters. The vision was
as follows.

She dreamed that we were busily employed in carrying out our scheme of
removal, and that I came into the parlour where she was making some
arrangements, and, with rather an agitated manner, told her that the
carriage had come for the children. She thought she went out to the hall,
in consequence, holding little Fanny by one hand, and the boy--or, as we
still called him, "baby,"--by the other, and feeling, as she did so, an
unaccountable gloom, almost amounting to terror, steal over her. The
children, too, seemed, she thought, frightened, and disposed to cry.

So close to the hall-door as to exclude the light, stood some kind of
vehicle, of which she could see nothing but that its door was wide open,
and the interior involved in total darkness. The children, she thought,
shrunk back in great trepidation, and she addressed herself to induce
them, by persuasion, to enter, telling them that they were only "going to
their new home." So, in a while, little Fanny approached it; but, at the
same instant, some person came swiftly up from behind, and, raising the
little boy in his hands, said fiercely, "No, the baby first"; and placed
him in the carriage. This person was our lodger, Mr. Smith, and was gone
as soon as seen. My wife, even in her dream, could not act or speak; but
as the child was lifted into the carriage-door, a man, whose face was
full of beautiful tenderness and compassion, leaned forward from the
carriage and received the little child,