One July afternoon, in particular, when the heat was almost as intense as at Calcutta, and no punkahs to cool one, I went to this place with malice prepense to lie there and do nothing, which, from my youth up, has always been synonymous with a <i>siesta</i>. I cannot do absolutely nothing, and yet keep awake. I very much admire the people whom I often meet in railway carriages, who endure, without books or newspapers, hundreds of miles of weary travel, and who do it with their eyes open. I wonder they do not break out into a melody, or at least a whistle. They cannot possibly be thinking all that time, and indeed they have no appearance of employing themselves in that way, but "stare right on with calm eternal eyes," with no more speculation in them than those of the sphinx herself. I envy, but I cannot imitate those happy persons. There is no such state of coma with me; I either wake or sleep. I lay, then, beneath the limes by the brook in Fairburn Chase, half-buried in the soft brown sand; and even while I looked upon the glancing stream, with the grand old willow opposite, that bent its hoary honours half-way o'er, the scene dissolved and changed; the brook became a river, and the willow a palm-tree, and the Chase a sandy tract, and the fir-clump on the distant hill the snow-capped Himalaya. I saw, too--and, alas! I was never more to see them, except, as then, in dreams--my father and my mother; but they passed by me with pitiful, loving looks, and went their way. Then the ayah, the black nurse who was watching over me--for I was once more a child--stole down to the river-brink, and drew a fluted dagger from her bosom, and dipped it in the sacred flood, and I felt that I was to die. I knew her well; we two had loved one another as nurse and child do love, where the nurse perforce takes half the mother's part; as the child grows up, his affection, at the best, congeals to gratitude; but not so with the breast that suckled him--God forgive us men; and the pain of my dream was sharpest because it was my own dear ayah who was about to slay me. I had offended Vishnu, or else she would not have done it; her gods demanded my life of her; but she was sorry; I felt her cold lips upon my brow, and then a large round tear fell upon my cheek like icy hail, and I awoke. There was a tumult of sounds in the air; the birds, and the bees, and the bubbling wave, silent while I had slept, seemed to have burst out together in chorus at my waking. I was bewildered, and knew not where I was. My dream was more distinct at first than the realities about me. If I had but closed my eyes again, I knew that it would be continued at the spot where it had left off, that the fluted dagger would have drunk my life-blood; and therefore I made an effort to rouse myself. Wondrous are dreams, and wondrous the borderland 'twixt life and sleep! If my existence had depended upon it, I could not, for some seconds, have told for certain whether I was in England or in India.