the whole neighbourhood.  Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him, and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were to defend, plunging on their pillows, battening down their eyelids, breathing with a dreadful regularity.  Alas! it came to their knowledge that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers.  Every resonant quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, in addition to the reiterated quarters, four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes, with the aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions of torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a sleepless night.

From that period the curse was milder, but the victims raged.  They swam on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the weapons of black Insomnia’s armoury and became her soldiery, doing her will upon themselves.  Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness.  She is the fountain of the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite for change.

Dacier was never the best of sleepers.  He had taken to exercise his brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than commonly a child of nerves:  nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point of vantage denied to them.  Physically he had stout reserves, for he had not disgraced the temple.  His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise and lead:  a precocious ambition.  This apparently modest young man started with an aim—­and if in the distance and with but a slingstone, like the slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were in his aim—­at Government.  He had hung on the fringe of an Administration.  His party was out, and he hoped for higher station on its return to power.  Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his head; among them at present one sufficiently magnified and voracious to swallow the remainder.  He added force to the interrogation as to why that Bell should sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why he was there to hear it!  A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have enlightened him if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the peculiar kind of sorcery issuing from that sex.  He rather despised the power of women over men:  and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell, instead of having obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter were urgent.  He had received letters at Lugano, summoning him home, before he set forth on his present