She laughed and blushed--there was a rebuke in it. She turned to go to rest; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet faldstool, among all the nicknacks which now-a-days make a luxury of devotion, was it strange if, after she had prayed for the fate of nations and churches, and for those who, as she thought, were fighting at Oxford the cause of universal truth and reverend antiquity, she remembered in her petitions the poor godless youth, with his troubled and troubling eloquence? But it was strange that she blushed when she mentioned his name--why should she not pray for him as she prayed for others? Perhaps she felt that she did not pray for him as she prayed for others. She left the AEolian harp in the window, as a luxury if she should wake, and coiled herself up among lace pillows and eider blemos; and the hound coiled himself up on the gravel-walk, after a solemn vesper-ceremony of three turns round in his own length, looking vainly for a 'soft stone.' The finest of us are animals after all, and live by eating and sleeping: and, taken as animals, not so badly off either--unless we happen to be Dorsetshire labourers--or Spitalfields weavers--or colliery children--or marching soldiers-- or, I am afraid, one half of English souls this day. And Argemone dreamed;--that she was a fox, flying for her life through a churchyard--and Lancelot was a hound, yelling and leaping, in a red coat and white buckskins, close upon her--and she felt his hot breath, and saw his white teeth glare. . . . And then her father was there: and he was an Italian boy, and played the organ-- and Lancelot was a dancing dog, and stood up and danced to the tune of 'C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour,' pitifully enough, in his red coat--and she stood up and danced too; but she found her fox-fur dress insufficient, and begged hard for a paper frill--which was denied her: whereat she cried bitterly and woke; and saw the Night peeping in with her bright diamond eyes, and blushed, and hid her beautiful face in the pillows, and fell asleep again. What the little imp, who managed this puppet-show on Argemone's brain-stage, may have intended to symbolise thereby, and whence he stole his actors and stage-properties, and whether he got up the interlude for his own private fun, or for that of a choir of brother Eulenspiegels, or, finally, for the edification of Argemone as to her own history, past, present, or future, are questions which we must leave unanswered, till physicians have become a little more of metaphysicians, and have given up their present plan of ignoring for nine hundred and ninety-nine pages that most awful and significant custom of dreaming, and then in the thousandth page talking the boldest materialist twaddle about it. In the meantime, Lancelot, contrary to the colonel's express commands, was sitting up to indite the following letter to his cousin, the Tractarian curate:--