Though comfort grows thereafter, nevermore
    The bond then snapped, the passionate young faith,
  Can healing years with all their gifts restore. 
    From Psyche’s wings life’s rude and careless breath
          Hath dashed the purple dust,
  And with it died the rapture and the trust.

EMMA LAZARUS.

* * * * *

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A SLEEPING-CAR SERENADE.

Not long ago I had to travel by the night-express from Montreal to New York, and feeling drowsy about eleven o’clock, presented my claim for a lower berth in the car paradoxically designated “sleeping,” and tantalizingly named “palace,” with sanguine hopes of obtaining a refreshing snooze.  Knowing from experience the aberrations of mind peculiar to travelers roused from sleep, by which they are impelled to get off at way-stations, I secured my traps against the contingencies liable to unchecked baggage, and creeping into the back of the sepulchral shelf called a bed, I enveloped myself after the fashion of Indian squaws and Egyptian mummies, and fell asleep.

I do not know whether the noise and concussion of the cars excite the same sort of dreams in every one’s cranium as they do in mine, but they almost invariably produce in my brain mental phenomena of a pugnacious character, which are nothing modified by palace cars and steel rails.  This particular night there was a perfect revelry of dreams in my brain.  I was on the frontier with our corps, engaged in a glorious hand-to-hand conflict with men our equals in number and valor.  We were having the best of it, giving it to them hot and heavy, crash! through the beggars’ skulls, and plunge! into their abominable abdominal regions.  “No quarter!” It was a pity, but it seemed splendid.

Bang! roared an Armstrong gun, as I thought, close to my ear:  down went a whole column of the enemy like a flash, as I awoke to find it a dream, alas! and the supposed artillery nothing more or less than one of those sharp, gurgling snorts produced during inspiration in the larynx of a stout Jewish gentleman, who had in some mysterious way got on the outer half of my shelf during my sleep, and whose ancient descent was clearly defined in the side view I immediately obtained of the contour and size of his nose.  I had got one of my arms out from under the covering, and found I had “cut left” directly upon the prominent proboscis of my friend—­a passage of arms that materially accelerated his breathing, and awoke him to the fact that though he had a nose sufficiently large to have entitled him to Napoleon’s consideration for a generalship had he lived in the days of that potentate, yet there was something unusual on the end of it, which was far too large for a pimple and rather heavy for a fly.  Perhaps it induced a nightmare, and deluded him into the belief that he had been metamorphosed into an elephant, and hadn’t