abysmal treachery.  Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that dream repeats for every one of us, through every generation, the original temptation in Eden.  Every one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the infirm places of his own individual will; once again a snare is made ready for leading him into captivity to a luxury of ruin; again, as in aboriginal Paradise, the man falls from innocence; once again, by infinite iteration, the ancient Earth groans to God, through her secret caves, over the weakness of her child; “Nature, from her seat, sighing through all her works,” again “gives signs of woe that all is lost;” and again the counter sigh is repeated to the sorrowing heavens of the endless rebellion against God.  Many people think that one man, the patriarch of our race, could not in his single person execute this rebellion for all his race.  Perhaps they are wrong.  But, even if not, perhaps in the world of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the original act.  Our English rite of “Confirmation,” by which, in years of awakened reason, we take upon us the engagements contracted for us in our slumbering infancy,—­how sublime a rite is that!  The little postern gate, through which the baby in its cradle had been silently placed for a time within the glory of God’s countenance, suddenly rises to the clouds as a triumphal arch, through which, with banners displayed and martial pomps, we make our second entry as crusading soldiers militant for God, by personal choice and by sacramental oath.  Each man says in effect—­“Lo!  I rebaptise myself; and that which once was sworn on my behalf, now I swear for myself.”  Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the aboriginal fall.

As I drew near to the Manchester post office, I found that it was considerably past midnight; but to my great relief, as it was important for me to be in Westmorland by the morning, I saw by the huge saucer eyes of the mail, blazing through the gloom of overhanging houses, that my chance was not yet lost.  Past the time it was; but by some luck, very unusual in my experience, the mail was not even yet ready to start.  I ascended to my seat on the box, where my cloak was still lying as it had lain at the Bridgewater Arms.  I had left it there in imitation of a nautical discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of his discovery, by way of warning off the ground the whole human race, and signalising to the Christian and the heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he has planted his throne for ever upon that virgin soil:  henceforward claiming the jus dominii to the top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right of driving shafts to the centre of the earth below it; so that all people found after this warning, either aloft