This startled him a little, and he awoke sufficiently to become aware of the fog-bells.

Again he dreamed.  Minnie was his theme now, but, strange to say, he felt little or no tenderness towards her.  She was beset by a hundred ruffians in pea-jackets and sou’westers.  Something stirred him to madness.  He rushed at the foe, and began to hit out at them right and left.  The hitting was slow, but sure—­regular as clockwork.  First the right, then the left, and at each blow a seaman’s nose was driven into his head, and a seaman’s body lay flat on the ground.  At length they were all floored but one—­the last and the biggest.  Ruby threw all his remaining strength into one crashing blow, drove his fist right through his antagonist’s body, and awoke with a start to find his knuckles bleeding.

“Hang these bells!” he exclaimed, starting up and gazing round him in despair.  Then he fell back on his pillow in despair, and went to sleep in despair.

Once more he dreamed.  He was going to church now, dressed in a suit of the finest broadcloth, with Minnie on his arm, clothed in pure white, emblematic, it struck him, of her pure gentle spirit.  Friends were with him, all gaily attired, and very happy, but unaccountably silent.  Perhaps it was the noise of the wedding-bells that rendered their voices inaudible.  He was struck by the solemnity as well as the pertinacity of these wedding-bells as he entered the church.  He was puzzled too, being a Presbyterian, why he was to be married in church, but being a man of liberal mind, he made no objection to it.

They all assembled in front of the pulpit, into which the clergyman, a very reverend but determined man, mounted with a prayer book in his hand.  Ruby was puzzled again.  He had not supposed that the pulpit was the proper place, but modestly attributed this to his ignorance.

“Stop those bells!” said the clergyman, with stern solemnity; but they went on.

“Stop them, I say!” he roared in a voice of thunder.  The sexton, pulling the ropes in the middle of the church, paid no attention.

Exasperated beyond endurance, the clergyman hurled the prayer book at the sexton’s head, and felled him!  Still the bells went on of their own accord.

“Stop! sto-o-o-o-p!  I say,” he yelled fiercely, and, hitting the pulpit with his fist, he split it from top to bottom.

Minnie cried “Shame!” at this, and from that moment the bells ceased.

Whether it was that the fog-bells ceased at that time, or that Minnie’s voice charmed Ruby’s thoughts away, we cannot tell, but certain it is that the severely tried youth became entirely oblivious of everything.  The marriage-party vanished with the bells; Minnie, alas! faded away also; finally, the roar of the sea round the Bell Rock, the rock itself, its lighthouse and its inmates, and all connected with it, faded from the sleeper’s mind, and

“like the baseless fabric of a vision,
Left not a wrack behind.”