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MY DREAM.
I think I will tell the dream I had. I cannot well account for the
beginning of it: the end will appear sufficiently explicable to those who
are quite satisfied that they get rid of the mystery of a thing when they
can associate it with something else with which they are familiar. Such
do not care to see that the thing with which they associate it may be as
mysterious as the other. For although use too often destroys marvel, it
cannot destroy the marvellous. The origin of our thoughts is just as
wonderful as the origin of our dreams.
In my dream I found myself in a pleasant field full of daisies and white
clover. The sun was setting. The wind was going one way, and the shadows
another. I felt rather tired, I neither knew nor thought why. With an old
man's prudence, I would not sit down upon the grass, but looked about for
a more suitable seat. Then I saw, for often in our dreams there is an
immediate response to our wishes, a long, rather narrow stone lying a few
yards from me. I wondered how it could have come there, for there were no
mountains or rocks near: the field was part of a level country. Carelessly,
I sat down upon it astride, and watched the setting of the sun. Somehow I
fancied that his light was more sorrowful than the light of the setting sun
should be, and I began to feel very heavy at the heart. No sooner had the
last brilliant spark of his light vanished, than I felt the stone under me
begin to move. With the inactivity of a dreamer, however, I did not care
to rise, but wondered only what would come next. My seat, after several
strange tumbling motions, seemed to rise into the air a little way, and
then I found that I was astride of a gaunt, bony horse--a skeleton horse
almost, only he had a gray skin on him. He began, apparently with pain,
as if his joints were all but too stiff to move, to go forward in the
direction in which he found himself. I kept my seat. Indeed, I never
thought of dismounting. I was going on to meet what might come. Slowly,
feebly, trembling at every step, the strange steed went, and as he went his
joints seemed to become less stiff, and he went a little faster. All at
once I found that the pleasant field had vanished, and that we were on the
borders of a moor. Straight forward the horse carried me, and the moor
grew very rough, and he went stumbling dreadfully, but always recovering
himself. Every moment it seemed as if he would fall to rise no more, but
as often he found fresh footing. At length the surface became a little
smoother, and he began a horrible canter which lasted till he reached
a low, broken wall, over which he half walked, half fell into what was
plainly an ancient neglected churchyard. The mounds were low and covered
with rank grass. In some parts, hollows had taken the place of mounds.
Gravestones lay in every position except the level or the upright, and
broken masses of monuments were scattered about. My horse bore me into the
midst of it, and there, slow and stiff as he had risen, he lay down again.
Once more I was astride of a long narrow stone. And now I found that it was
an ancient gravestone which I knew well in a certain Sussex churchyard, the
top of it carved into the rough resemblance of a human skeleton--that of a
man, tradition said, who had been killed by a serpent that came out of a
bottomless pool in the next field. How long I sat there I do not know; but
at last I saw the faint gray light of morning begin to appear in front of
me. The horse of death had carried me eastward. The dawn grew over the top
of a hill that here rose against the horizon. But it was a wild dreary
dawn--a blot of gray first, which then stretched into long lines of dreary
yellow and gray, looking more like a blasted and withered sunset than a
fresh sunrise. And well it suited that waste, wide, deserted churchyard, if
churchyard I ought to call it where no church was to be seen--only a vast
hideous square of graves. Before me I noticed especially one old grave, the
flat stone of which had broken in two and sunk in the middle. While I sat
with my eyes fixed on this stone, it began to move; the crack in the middle
closed, then widened again as the two halves of the stone were lifted up,
and flung outward, like the two halves of a folding door. From the grave
rose a little child, smiling such perfect contentment as if he had just
come from kissing his mother. His little arms had flung the stones apart,
and as he stood on the edge of the grave next to me, they remained
outspread from the action for a moment, as if blessing the sleeping people.
Then he came towards me with the same smile, and took my hand. I rose, and
he led me away over another broken wall towards the hill that lay before
us. And as we went the sun came nearer, the pale yellow bars flushed into
orange and rosy red, till at length the edges of the clouds were swept with
an agony of golden light, which even my dreamy eyes could not endure, and I
awoke weeping for joy.
This waking woke my wife, who said in some alarm:
"What is the matter, husband?"
So I told her my dream, and how in my sleep my gladness had overcome me.
"It was this little darling that set you dreaming so," she said, and
turning, put the baby in my arms.
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