the cable through the hawse-hole; she shook to it, sheered astern, and brought up with her anchor fast. By that time the rain was plashing down in a perfect deluge--you couldn't see a yard from you--all was one white pour of it; although it soon began to drive again over the headland, as the tornado gathered new food out of it. Another anchor was let go, cable payed out, and the ship soon began to swing the other way to the tide, pitching all the while on the short swell. The gale still whistled through her spars for two or three hours, during which it began by degrees to lull. About eleven o'clock it was clear moonlight to leeward, the air fresh and cool: a delicious watch it was, too. I was walking the poop by myself, two or three men lounging sleepily about the forecastle, and Rickett below on the quarterdeck, when I saw the chief officer himself rush up from below, staring wildly round him, as if he thought we were in some dream or other. I fancied at first the mate would have struck Rickett, from the way he went on, but I kept aft where I was. The eddies ran past the Indiaman's side, and you heard the fast ebb of the tide rushing and rippling sweetly on her taut cables ahead, plashing about the bows and bends. We were in old Bob Martin's _river_, whatever that might be. THE VISION OF SUDDEN DEATH. [The reader is to understand this present paper, in its two sections of _The Vision_, &c., and _The Dream-Fugue_, as connected with a previous paper on _The English Mail-Coach_, published in the Magazine for October. The ultimate object was the Dream-Fugue, as an attempt to wrestle with the utmost efforts of music in dealing with a colossal form of impassioned horror. The Vision of Sudden Death contains the mail-coach incident, which did really occur, and did really suggest the variations of the Dream, here taken up by the Fugue, as well as other variations not now recorded. Confluent with these impressions, from the terrific experience on the Manchester and Glasgow mail, were other and more general impressions, derived from long familiarity with the English mail, as developed in the former paper; impressions, for instance, of animal beauty and power, of rapid motion, at that time unprecedented, of connexion with the government and public business of a great nation, but, above all, of connexion with the national victories at an unexampled crisis,--the mail being the privileged organ for publishing and dispersing all news of that kind. From this function of the mail, arises naturally the introduction of Waterloo into the fourth variation of the Fugue; for the mail itself having been carried into the dreams by the incident in the Vision, naturally all the accessory circumstances of pomp and grandeur investing this national carriage followed in the train of the principal image.]