that the darkness seemed to split asunder with a prodigious flaming of lights and a myriad of circling stars, which presently disappeared into the profound and utter darkness of insensibility.  How long this swoon continued our young gentleman could never tell, but when he regained so much of his consciousness as to be aware of the things about him, he beheld himself to be confined in a room, the walls whereof were yellow and greasy with dirt, he himself having been laid upon a bed so foul and so displeasing to his taste that he could not but regret the swoon from which he had emerged into consciousness.  Looking down at his person, he beheld that his clothes had all been taken away from him, and that he was now clad in a shirt with only one sleeve, and a pair of breeches so tattered that they barely covered his nakedness.  While he lay thus, dismally depressed by so sad a pickle as that into which he found himself plunged, he was strongly and painfully aware of an uproarious babble of loud and drunken voices and a continual clinking of glasses, which appeared to sound as from a tap-room beneath, these commingled now and then with oaths and scraps of discordant song bellowed out above the hubbub.  His wounded head beat with tremendous and straining painfulness, as though it would burst asunder, and he was possessed by a burning thirst that seemed to consume his very vitals.  He called aloud, and in reply a fat, one-eyed woman came, fetching him something to drink in a cup.  This he swallowed with avidity, and thereupon (the liquor perhaps having been drugged) he dropped off into unconsciousness once more.

When at last he emerged for a second time into the light of reason, it was to find himself aboard a brig—­the Prophet Daniel, he discovered her name to be—­bound for Baltimore, in the Americas, and then pitching and plunging upon a westerly running stern-sea, and before a strong wind that drove the vessel with enormous velocity upon its course for those remote and unknown countries for which it was bound.  The land was still in sight both astern and abeam, but before him lay the boundless and tremendously infinite stretch of the ocean.  Dunburne found himself still to be clad in the one-armed shirt and tattered breeches that had adorned him in the house of the crimp in which he had first awakened.  Now, however, an old tattered hat with only a part of the crown had been added to his costume.  As though to complete the sad disorder of his appearance, he discovered, upon passing his hand over his countenance, that his beard and hair had started a bristling growth, and that the lump on his crown—­which was even yet as big as a walnut—­ was still patched with pieces of dirty sticking-plaster.  Indeed, had he but known it, he presented as miserable an appearance as the most miserable of those wretches who were daily ravished from the slums and streets of the great cities to be shipped to the Americas.  Nor was he a long time in discovering that he was now one of the several such indentured servants who, upon the conclusion of their voyage, were to be sold for their passage in the plantations of Maryland.