Alas for the man who draws his courage from wine! the same _alas_ for the man whose health is its buttress! the touch of a pin on this or that spot of his mortal house, will change him from a leader of armies, or a hunter of tigers in the jungle, to one who shudders at a centipede! That courage also which is mere insensibility crumbles at once before any object of terror able to stir the sluggish imagination. There is a fear, this for one, that for another, which can appall the stoutest who is not one with the essential. Lord Mergwain emerged from the influence of his imagination and his fears, and went under that of his senses and himself. He took his place beside the Christian in his low, common moods, when the world, with its laws and its material insistence, presses upon him, and he does not believe that God cares for the sparrow, or can possibly count the hairs of his head; when the divine power, and rule, and means to help, seem nowhere but in a passed-away fancy of the hour of prayer. Only the Christian is then miserable, and Lord Mergwain was relieved; for did he not then come to himself? and did he know anything better to arrive at than just that wretched self of his? A glass or two more, and he laughed at the terror by night. He had been a thorough fool not to go to bed like other people, instead of sitting by the fire with a porridge-eating Scotchman, who regarded him as one of the wicked, afraid of the darkness. The thought may have passed from his mind to that of his host, for the self-same moment the laird spoke: “Don’t you think you had better go to bed when you have finished your bottle, my lord?” With the words, a cold swell, as from the returning tide of some dead sea, so long ebbed that men had ploughed and sown and built within its bed, stole in, swift and black, filling every cranny of the old man’s conscious being. “My God!” he cried; “I thought better of you than that, laird! I took you for a man of your word! You promised to sit up with me!” “I did, my lord, and am ready to keep my promise. I only thought you looked as if you might have changed your mind; and in such a night as this, beyond a doubt, bed is the best place for everybody that has got one to go to.” “That depends,” answered his lordship, and drank. The laird held his peace for a time, then spoke again: “Would your lordship think me rude if I were to take a book?” “I don’t want a noise. It don’t go well with old wine like this: such wine wants attention! It would spoil it. No, thank you.” “I did not propose to read aloud, my lord--only to myself.” “Oh! That alters the matter! That I would by no means object to. I am but poor company!” The laird got his “Journal,” and was soon lost in the communion of a kindred soul.