“A moment, and all will be over!”

It was the voice of the tempter.

Markland buried his face in his hands, and sat for a long time as motionless as if sleep had obscured his senses; and all that time a fearful debate was going on in his mind.  At last he rose up, changed in feeling as well as in aspect.  His resolution was taken, and a deep, almost leaden, calmness pervaded his spirit.  He had resolved on self-destruction!

With a strange coolness, the self-doomed man now proceeded to select the agent of death.  He procured a work on poisons, and studied the effects of different substances, choosing, finally, that which did the fatal work most quickly and with the slightest pain.  This substance was then procured.  But he could not turn forever from those nearest and dearest, without a parting word.

The day had run almost to a close in these fearful struggles and fatal preparations; and the twilight was falling, when, exhausted and in tears, the wretched man folded, with trembling hands, a letter he had penned to his wife.  This done, he threw himself, weak as a child, upon the bed, and, ere conscious that sleep was stealing upon him, fell off into slumber.

Sleep!  It is the great restorer.  For a brief season the order of life is changed, and the involuntary powers of the mind bear rule in place of the voluntary.  The actual, with all its pains and pleasures, is for the time annihilated.  The pressure of thought and the fever of emotion are both removed, and the over-taxed spirit is at rest.  Into his most loving guardianship the great Creator of man, who gave him reason and volition, and the freedom to guide himself, takes his creature, and, while the image of death is upon him, gathers about him the Everlasting Arms.  He suspends, for a time, the diseased voluntary life, that he may, through the involuntary, restore a degree of health, and put the creature he has formed for happiness in a new condition of mental and moral freedom.

Blessed sleep!  Who has not felt and acknowledged thy sweet influences?  Who has not wondered at thy power in the tranquil waking, after a night that closed around the spirit in what seemed the darkness of coming despair?

Markland slept; and in his sleep, guided by angels, there came to him the spirits of his wife and children, clothed in the beauty of innocence.  How lovingly they gathered around him! how sweet were their words in his ears! how exquisite the thrill awakened by each tender kiss!  Now he was with them in their luxurious home; and now they were wandering, in charmed intercourse, amid its beautiful surroundings.  Change after change went on; new scenes and new characters appeared, and yet the life seemed orderly and natural.  Suddenly there came a warning of danger.  The sky grew fearfully dark; fierce lightning burned through the air, and the giant tempest swept down upon the earth with resistless fury.  Next a flood was