At length, when I least expected a change, I was suddenly cast to the bottom of a deep pit. The luxury of repose to my wounded and exhausted frame, was as grateful and refreshing as the dews of heaven to the long parched earth. I lay in a sort of pleasing helplessness, too glad to escape from past perils to imagine a recurrence of the same evil. While dreamily watching the swallows, tending their young in the holes of the sandy bank that formed the walls of my prison, I observed the sand at the bottom of the pit caught up in little eddies and whirling round and round. A sickening feeling of dread stole over me, and I crouched down in an agony of fear, and clung with all my strength to the tufts of thorny shrubs which clothed the sides of the pit. Again the wind-fiend caught me up on his broad pinions, and I was once more traversing with lightning speed the azure deserts of air. A burning heat was in my throat--my eyes seemed bursting from their sockets; confused sounds were murmuring in my ears, and the very blackness of darkness swallowed me up. No longer carried upward, I was now rapidly descending from some tremendous height. I stretched forth my hands to grasp some tangible substance in order to break the horrors of that fall, but all above, around, and beneath me, was empty air;--the effort burst the chains of that ghastly slumber, and I awoke with a short stifled cry of terror, exclaiming with devotional fervour, "Thank God! it is only a dream!" The damp dews stood in large drops upon my brow, my hands were tightly clenched, and every hair upon my head seemed stiffened and erect with fear. "Thank God!" I once more exclaimed in an agony of gratitude, "it is only a dream!" Then arose the question: "What was the import of this dream, the effects of which I still felt through all my trembling frame, in the violent throbbing of my heart, and the ghastly cessation of every emotion save that of horror?" Then I began to ponder, as I had done a thousand times before, over the mysterious nature of dreams, the manner in which they had been employed by the Almighty to communicate important truths to mankind, until I came to the conclusion that dreams were revelations from the spirit land, to warn us of dangers which threatened, or to punish us for crimes committed in the flesh. "What are the visions which haunt the murderer's bed," I thought, "but phantoms of the past recalled by memory and conscience, and invested with an actual presence in sleep?" Dr. Young, that melancholy dreamer of sublime dreams, has said-- "If dreams infest the grave, I wake emerging from a sea of dreams." What a terrible idea of future punishment is contained in these words to one, whose sleep like mine is haunted by unutterable terrors! Think of an eternity of dreaming horrors. A hell condensed within the narrow resting-place of the grave.