WITH Thursday morning came an east wind: it was moderate, at first, but freshened up, and blew positively strong; the sky became heavily overcast with clouds, the rain fell—so did the mercury in the barometer—and there was every indication of an easterly gale. Still, as night came on, and it had not yet amounted to a gale, the ship was kept running before the wind under her three lower top-sails, and we made pretty good time toward New York. I retired that night not quite at ease, but still sufficiently so to rest well; and as the vessel was kept before the wind all night, and did not rock much, I didn’t tumble out of my berth, as one may reasonably expect to do when the vessel rolls heavily. I am not in the habit of paying any attention to dreams, or of relating them; but one that visited me that night was so inexpressibly ludicrous, that I must “out with it.” I dreamed that I, in company with a very black African, armed with an axe, was in a deep, thick wood in California, looking for a pole to make sled-soles of, when a big bear made his appearance, and immediately “went for” us. The darkey dropped the axe, sprung upon a stump near by, and squatted on the top of it, trembling with terror; but I, not being in a condition to retreat with speed, caught up the axe, threw down my crutch, balanced myself on my foot, and as the bear came on and reared up to hug me to death, I aimed a blow at his head. But it missed his head and cut off one of his fore-paws—a bear has _four_ of them, you know—the blood spurting forth from the stump, in a way that was quite gratifying to me. He was not placed _hors du combat_, however, but persisted in his attack on me with extraordinary vigor. I aimed another blow at the seat of his intellect; but, singularly enough, missed it again, and cut off the other fore-paw. As I did so, the axe flew from my hands, and fell at the foot of a big tree, thirty feet distant. The bear, not yet discomfitted, growled savagely, showed his teeth, and came dancing at me, holding up his bloody stumps, as though still determined, even with them, to crush me. Finding myself unarmed, and without so much leisure time as to pick up my crutch, I turned about and made a hop toward the stump on which the darkey sat. The bear hopped after me. I had thought of climbing up on the stump, but the frightened darkey occupied all the space there; so I just kept on retreating round the stump, hopping as fast as I could, and close at my heel came the bloody bear, hopping, too, as fast as _he_ could. The whole picture, with the scared nigger on the stump in the center,—his thick lips mumbling unintelligible words of fright, and his white eyes starting out so that they could have been knocked off with a club, without touching his flat nose—was so unprecedentedly ludicrous, that terrified, as I fancied I was, I laughed outright, in the very midst of my visionary peril; and so awoke.