For the want of something better to do, in the gloom and silence of the cellar, he went to sleep; as almost any sailor is apt to do, when he has nothing to busy his hands or occupy his mind. He is “broke of his rest,” as the elderly ladies in the country say; and it is just as natural for him to go to sleep as it is for him to “splice the main-brace.” Jack went to sleep. He had not eaten anything to give him the nightmare, and his bed was hard, cold, and uncomfortable. His position was rather cramped; and these things, combined, caused him to dream. An old horse, thin, spavined, and afflicted with the heaves, covered all over with stars and bars, slowly came round, and began making stern-way till his heels were within reach of the dreamer. He thought it was about time to retire, but found himself unable to move. The old horse deliberately raised his heels, and kicked him in the head. He tried to cry out, and tried to beat a retreat; both of which, for some mysterious reason, he was unable to do. The dilapidated old nag continued to pound away till his head seemed to be mashed to a jelly, and, when it appeared to him that the end of all things had come, he waked up in a violent perspiration, trembling from head to foot with the agony he had endured during his slumbers. It was dark as Egypt; but there was no old horse present. He felt around him, and the boxes and barrels among which he had stowed himself recalled his bewildered senses, and informed him where he was. He rubbed his eyes, and renewed the vision which had just faded from his consciousness. The old horse was, without doubt, the Southern Confederacy; a fact sufficiently certified by the stars and bars he wore. Jack could not help laughing at the sorry figure of the miserable creature; but, when he thought what awful blows the typical beast had given him, he concluded that the Confederacy, though a one-horse affair, was not to be despised. Jack had seen a dream-book on board the Harrisburg; but what the significance of dreaming about horses, and especially about such a miserable beast as that which had occupied his slumbering mind, might be, he could not tell. In truth, he had not much faith in dreams; yet he could hardly escape the conclusion, that such a remarkable vision must mean something. If not actually a captive in the hands of the rebels, he was certainly in a fair way of becoming such; and he was afraid the dream foreshadowed his own fate in the hands of the enemy: but he hoped, if he was doomed to a rebel prison, that the old horse would not kick quite so hard as he had in his dream.