The serenity of my mind gave way before the attacks of these monsters; sleeping and waking, by day and by night, they assailed me with equal pertinacity and fury. If I slept, it was only to be tormented by demon and caco-demon--to be ridden double by incubus and succuba, under whose bestriding limbs I felt like a Shetland pony carrying two elephants. My dreams, indeed, so varied and terrific were the images with which they afflicted me, I can compare to nothing but the horrors or last delirium of a toper. Hanging, drowning, and tumbling down church-steeples were the common and least frightful of the fancies that crowded my sleeping brain: now I was blown up in a steamboat, or run over by a railroad car; now I was sticking fast in a burning chimney, scorching and smothering, and now, head downwards, in a hollow tree, with a bear below snapping at my nose; now I was plastered up in a thick wall, with masons hard at work running the superstructure up higher, and now I was enclosed in a huge apple-dumpling, boiling in a pot over a hot fire. One while I was crushed by a boa constrictor; another, perishing by inches in the mouth of a Bengal tiger; and, again, I was in the hands of Dr. Tibbikens and his scientific coadjutors of the village, who were dissecting me alive. In short, there was no end to the torments I endured in slumber, and nothing could equal them except those that beset me while awake. A miserable melancholy seized upon my spirits, in which those very qualifications which everybody envied me the possession of were regarded with disgust, as serving only the purpose of adding to my tortures. What cared I for youth, when it opened only a longer vista of living wretchedness? What to me was the wealth which I could not enjoy? which had been given me only to tantalize? And as for independence, the idea was a mockery; the servitude of a galley-slave was freedom, unlimited license, compared with my subjection to dyspepsy, and--for the truth must be confessed--the doctor; to whom I was at last obliged to submit, _nolens volens_. 5. CHAPTER V. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF SEVERAL SURPRISING TRANSFORMATIONS. _Whether_ Dr. Tibbikens treated me _secundum artem_ or not, I cannot say; but true it is, that instead of getting better, I grew gradually worse, until my melancholy became a confirmed hypochondriasis, and fancies gloomy and dire, wild and strange, seized upon my brain, and conjured up new afflictions. Getting up early one morning, I found, to my horror, that I had been, in my sleep, converted into a coffee-pot; a transformation which I thought so much more extraordinary than any other I had ever undergone, that I sent for my sister Ann, and imparted to her the singular secret. "Oh!" said she, bursting into tears, "it is all on account of your unfortunate digestive apparatus. But, oh! brother Arthur, don't let such notions get into your head. A coffee-pot, indeed! that's too ridiculous!"