stone of a bishop who slept beneath. This was my first terror, but the ringing had not continued a minute before a more awful and immediate dread came on me. The deafening sound of the bell smote into my ears with a thunder which made me fear their drums would crack. There was not a fiber of my body it did not thrill through: it entered my very soul; thought and reflection were almost utterly banished; I only retained the sensation of agonizing terror. Every moment I saw the bell sweep within an inch of my face; and my eyes - I could not close them, though to look at the object was bitter as death— followed it instinctively in its oscillating progress until it came back again. It was in vain I said to myself that it could come no nearer at any future swing than it did at first; every time it descended, I endeavored to shrink into the very floor to avoid being buried under the down-sweeping mass; and then, reflecting on the danger of pressing too weightily on my frail support, would cower up again as far as I dared.

At first my fears were mere matter of fact. I was afraid the pulleys above would give way, and let the bell plunge on me. At another time, the possibility of the clapper being shot out in some sweep, and dashing through my body, as I had seen a ramrod glide through a door, flitted across my mind. The dread also, as I have already mentioned, of the crazy floor tormented me; but these soon gave way to fears not more unfounded, but more visionary, and of course more tremendous. The roaring of the bell confused my intellect, and my fancy soon began to teem with all sorts of strange and terrifying ideas. The bell pealing above, and opening its jaws with a hideous clamor, seemed to me at one time a ravening monster, raging to devour me, at another, a whirlpool ready to suck me into its bellowing abyss. As I gazed on it, it assumed all shapes; it was a flying eagle, or rather a roc of the Arabian story-tellers, clapping its wings and screaming over me. As I looked upward into it, it would appear sometimes to lengthen into indefinite extent, or to be twisted at the end into the spiral folds of the tail of a flying-dragon. Nor was the flaming breath or fiery glance of that fabled animal wanting to complete the picture. My eyes, inflamed, bloodshot, and glaring, invested the supposed monster with a full proportion of unholy light.

It would be endless were I to merely hint at all the fancies that possessed my mind. Every object that was hideous and roaring presented itself to my imagination. I often thought

that I was in a hurricane at sea, and that the vessel in which I was embarked tossed under me with the most furious vehemence. The air, set in motion by the swinging of the bell, blew over me nearly with the violence and more than the thunder of a tempest; and the floor seemed to reel under me as under a drunken man. But the most awful of all the ideas that seized on me were drawn from the supernatural. In the vast cavern of the bell hideous faces appeared, and glared down on me with terrifying frowns, or with grinning mockery, still more appalling. At last the Devil himself, accoutered, as in the common description of the evil spirit, with hoof, horn, and tail, and eyes of infernal luster, made his appearance, and called on me to curse God and worship him, who was powerful to save me. This dread suggestion he uttered with the full-toned clangor of the bell. I had him within an inch of me, and I thought on the fate of the Santon Barsisa. Strenuously and desperately I defied him, and bade him be gone. Reason, then, for a moment resumed her sway, but it was only to fill me with fresh terror, just as the lightning dispels the gloom that surrounds the benighted mariner, but to show him that his vessel is driving on a rock, where she must inevitably be dashed to pieces. I found I was becoming delirious, and trembled lest reason should utterly desert me. This is at all times an agonizing thought, but it smote me then with tenfold agony. I feared lest, when utterly deprived of my senses, I should rise; to do which I was every moment tempted by that strange feeling which calls on a man, whose head is dizzy from standing on the battlement of a lofty castle, to precipitate himself from it; and then death would be instant and tremendous. When I thought of this I became desperate; I caught the floor with a grasp which drove the blood from my nails; and I yelled with the cry of despair. I called for help, I prayed, I shouted: but all the efforts of my voice were, of course, drowned in the bell. As it passed over my mouth, it occasionally echoed my cries, which mixed not with its own sound, but preserved their distinct character. Perhaps this was but fancy. To me, I know, they then sounded as if they were the shouting, howling, or laughing of the fiends with which my imagination had peopled the gloomy cave which swung over me.

You may accuse me of exaggerating my feelings; but I am not. Many a scene of dread have I since passed through, but they are nothing to the self-inflicted terrors of this half hour.

I

The ancients have doomed one of the damned, in their Tartarus, to lie under a rock which every moment seems to be descending to annihilate him; and an awful punishment it would be. But if to this you add a clamor as loud as if ten thousand Furies were howling about you, a deafening uproar banishing reason and driving you to madness, you must allow that the bitterness of the pang was rendered more terrible. There is no man, firm as his nerves may be, who could retain his courage in this situation. In twenty minutes the ringing was done. Half of that time passed over me without power of computation, the other half appeared an age. When it ceased I became gradually more quiet; but a new fear retained me. I knew that five minutes would elapse without ringing; but at the end of that short time the bell would be rung a second time for five minutes more. could not calculate time. A minute and an hour were of equal duration. I feared to rise, lest the five minutes should have elapsed, and the ringing be again commenced; in which case I should be crushed, before I could escape, against the walls or framework of the bell. I therefore still continued to lie down, cautiously shifting myself, however, with a careful gliding, so that my eye no longer looked into the hollow. This was of itself a considerable relief. The cessation of the noise had, in a great measure, the effect of stupefying me, for my attention, being no longer occupied by the chimeras I had conjured up, began to flag. All that now distressed me was the constant expectation of the second ringing, for which, however, I settled myself with a kind of stupid resolution. I closed my eyes, and clinched my teeth as firmly as if they were screwed in a vice. At last the dreaded moment came, and the first swing of the bell extorted a groan from me, as they say the most resolute victim screams at the sight of the rack, to which he is for a second time destined. After this, however, I lay silent and lethargic, without a thought. Wrapt in the defensive armor of stupidity, I defied the bell and its intonations. When it ceased, I was roused a little by the hope of escape. I did not, however, decide on this step hastily; but, putting up my hand with the utmost caution, I touched the rim. Though the ringing had ceased, it still was tremulous from the sound, and shook under my hand, which instantly recoiled as from an electric jar. A quarter of an hour probably elapsed before I again dared to make the experiment, and then I found it at rest. I determined to lose no time, fearing that I might have lain then

already too long, and that the bell for evening service would catch me. This dread stimulated me, and I slipped out with the utmost rapidity, and arose. I stood, I suppose, for a minute, looking with silly wonder on the place of my imprisonment, penetrated with joy at escaping, but then rushed down the stony and irregular stair with the velocity of lightning, and arrived in the bell-ringers' room. This was the last act I had power to accomplish. I leant against the wall, motionless and deprived of thought, in which posture my companions found me, when, in the course of a couple of hours, they returned to their occupation.

They were shocked, as well they might be, at the figure before them. The wind of the bell had excoriated my face, and my dim and stupefied eyes were fixed with a lack-luster gaze in my raw eyelids. My hands were torn and bleeding, my hair disheveled, and my clothes tattered. They spoke to me, but I gave no answer. They shook me, but I remained insensible. They then became alarmed, and hastened to remove me. He who had first gone up with me in the forenoon met them as they carried me through the church-yard, and through him, who was shocked at having, in some measure, occasioned the accident, the cause of my misfortune was discovered. I was put to bed at home, and remained for three days delirious, but gradually recovered my senses. You may be sure the bell formed a prominent topic of my ravings; and, if I heard a peal, they were instantly increased to the utmost violence. Even when the delirium abated, my sleep was continually disturbed by imagined ringings, and my dreams were haunted by the fancies which almost maddened me while in the steeple. My friends removed me to a house in the country, which was sufficiently distant from any place of worship to save me from the apprehensions of hearing the church-going bell; for what Alexander Selkirk, in Cowper's poem, complained of as a misfortune was then to me as a blessing. a blessing. Here I recovered; but even long after recovery, if the gale wafted the notes of a peal towards me, I started with nervous apprehension. I felt a Mahometan hatred to all the bell tribe, and envied the subjects of the Commander of the Faithful the sonorous voice of their Muezzin. Time cured this, as it cures the most of our follies; but even at the present day, if by chance my nerves be unstrung, some particular tones of the cathedral bell have power to surprise me into a momentary start.

THE NIGHT WALKER.

In a crowded and highly cultivated state of society like that of London, the race of exertion against time is incessant. Take a distant village, although a populous one (as in Devonshire or Cornwall), and even discord, during the hours of darkness, is found forgetting herself in rest. The last alehouse closes before the clock strikes ten, sending the very scapegraces of the hamlet in summer to bed by daylight; no lady would choose after curfew hour (even by beating her husband) to disturb her neighbors; and unless some tailor happens to be behindhand with a wedding pair of small clothes, or some housewife prolongs the washing-day and gives an extra hour to her lace caps, or unless the village be a post-stage, where the "first-turn-boy" must sleep in his spurs, or where, the mail changing horses, some one sits up to give the guard his glass of rum, no movable probably like a lighted candle is known to such a community from eleven o'clock on the Saturday night, to six o'clock on the Monday morning. In London, however, the course of affairs is widely different. As the broad glare of gas drives darkness even from our alleys, so multitudinous avocations keep rest forever from our streets. By an arrangement the opposite to that of Queen Penelope, it is during the night that the work of regeneration in our great capital goes on; it is by night that the great reservoirs which feed London and Westminster repair the vast expenditure which they make during the day. As the wants of twelve hundred thousand persons are not ministered to with a wet finger, this operation of replenishment does not proceed in silence. Its action is best observable (as regards the season) towards the end of spring; when, the town being at the fullest, the markets are most abundantly supplied. Then every succeeding hour of the four-and-twenty brings its peculiar business to be performed, and sets its peculiar agents into motion.

Between half-past eleven and twelve o'clock at night the several theaters of the metropolis discharge themselves of their loads, and at that hour it is (unless the House of Commons happens to sit late) that the last flush of passengers is seen in the streets of London. The forth-rushing multitudes of Covent Garden and Drury Lane pass westward in divisions by King Street and Leicesterfields, eastward by Catherine Street, the