"What can this mean?" he cried. "Have I endured a long and troubled dream, during which I have fancied myself living through more than two centuries? O Heaven, that it may be so! Oh that the fearful crimes I suppose I have committed have only been enacted in a dream! Oh that my victims are imaginary! Oh that Ebba should only prove a lovely phantom of the night! And yet, I could almost wish the rest were real--so that she might exist. I cannot bear to think that she is nothing more than a vision. But it must be so--I have been dreaming--and what a dream it has been!--what strange glimpses it has afforded me into futurity! Methought I lived in the reigns of many sovereigns--beheld one of them carried to the block--saw revolutions convulse the kingdom--old dynasties shaken down, and new ones spring up. Fashions seem to me to have so changed, that I had clean forgotten the old ones; while my fellow-men scarcely appeared the same as heretofore. Can I be the same myself? Is this the dress I once wore? Let me seek for some proof." And thrusting his hand into his doublet, he drew forth some tablets, and hastily examined them. They bore his name, and contained some writing, and he exclaimed aloud with joy, "This is proof enough--I have been dreaming all this while." "The scheme works to a miracle," muttered a personage stationed at the foot of the steps springing from the doorway, and who, though concealed from view himself, was watching the prisoner with a malignant and exulting gaze. "And yet, why am I here?" pursued Auriol, looking around. "Ah! I see how it is," he added, with a shudder; "I have been mad--perhaps am mad still. That will account for the strange delusion under which I have laboured." "I will act upon that hint," muttered the listener. "Of what use is memory," continued Auriol musingly, "if things that are not, seem as if they were? If joys and sorrows which we have never endured are stamped upon the brain--if visions of scenes, and faces and events which we have never witnessed, never known, haunt us, as if they had once been familiar? But I am mad--mad!" The listener laughed to himself. "How else, if I were not mad, could I have believed that I had swallowed the fabled elixir vitæ? And yet, is it a fable? for I am puzzled still. Methinks I am old--old--old--though I feel young, and look young. All this is madness. Yet how clear and distinct it seems! I can call to mind events in Charles the Second's time. Ha!--who told me of Charles the Second? How know I there was such a king? The reigning sovereign should be James, and yet I fancy it is George the Fourth. Oh! I am mad--clean mad!" There was another pause, during which the listener indulged in a suppressed fit of laughter.