Another dream invites you; but it must be sketched with more reticence, and this for two reasons. In the first place, the subject has become identified with that portion of theatrical entertainments usually found to be the least soporific. In the second place, if your imagination were encouraged to free range hereupon, you might be foolish enough to connect its poetic motion and its charm with certain souvenirs of a certain fair friend of yours, whom it were wiser to forget if you desire to profit by this Mandragorean system. Briefly, then, I commend a Ballet, as not altogether unworthy of trial--but not, be it observed, that thing of gas lamps, and pink tights, and leers, and _poses plastiques_, over which young America goes into raptures. By no means. Picture to yourself a smooth sward beneath clustered pines, a tender moonlight, and Nymphs--not semi-nude as is the fashion of our day, neither affecting the contortions of the gymnast as in our modern caricature of dancing--but robed in swansdown, with nodding plumes and tasseled fuschias pendent, tripping it, if you will, on "light fantastic toe," yet through stately and solemn measures. You remember Giulio Romano's dance of Apollo and the Muses in the Pitti at Florence? Take that for your model; then place the figures to your liking. Nor forget to add an orchestra of Æolian harps. Let them hang among the pine-branches, and sigh forth Weber's Last Waltz, just to set the groups in motion. Then fail not in your breathings, O soft night-wind; foot it daintily, ye wildwood Nymphs--so may sleep steal gently upon the restless one, while yet his ear and eye are unsated! Another dream: blue water again, though, this time, with a golden beach. It is calm; but the surf rolls in languidly, with low murmurous sound, as it will roll, be the sea's surface never so smooth, beyond the involuntary breakers. What graceful bends and curves are marked, for an instant, with frothy pencil, upon the shining sands! How they sparkle with evanescent light! How soon the tiny bubbles disappear! But you have watched all this, many and many a time; and stale indeed hereon were description and moralizing! Why, then, this present allusion? What is there in it, tending to lull the acuter sensibilities? What offers it of gently-soothing exercise to the overwrought and throbbing brain? This is the reply. Popular belief gives to every ninth or tenth wave, tumbling in upon the shore, supremacy over its fellows. It swells up into fuller volume. It sweeps landward with a more majestic force. This is the story; but I would have you test its correctness. Is it the ninth, or the tenth? So, lie down yonder upon the mass of dry sea-weed piled against the rocks, and count patiently a dozen, a score, a hundred, a thousand waves as they come in. You shall tell me, to-morrow morning, whether the ninth have it, or the tenth--whether there be any regularity at all.