yet built not that it might babble of their own names, but rather that it might bear witness to a higher Name. Verily, Babylon the Great has her glories-and these are amongst them. I have had, myself, almost all these delights to-day, and done a good day's work besides. I care not in what place-"the edge of the dark" is always solemn. It is solemn beyond description on a lonely heath, as the golden light of the furze fades out and grows dim under the cold grey shadows:-it is solemn also, and solemn with a world of human pathos, in the Seven Dials! Here, as the darkness gathers, as the lamps are lit, as faces that were dim a moment before are now plainly visible under the glaring gas, and are visible only to cause you a shudder, so deep their degradation, their squalor, their despair-here, no less than on the lonely heath, is the hour fraught with matter for grave and earnest thought. Our life needs no "startling scenic effects" to make it a "sensation drama." A garret is a sufficient stage when the tragedy performed is the conflict between good and evil; two tallow candles will suffice for footlights; and for orchestra, the blind half-drunken fiddler in the street. Nevertheless there are just two situations in which "the edge of the dark" is peculiarly impressive: the first is a hill a little distant from a great city, the second is a rock close to the sea. Ah me! how often have I watched it from both, from the former chiefly, of late years! Too far from London to hear its multitudinous clamour, yet not too far to see its countless domes and towers-too far to be absorbed in the passion of its life, yet not too far to see how thoroughly alive it is-take your station on a hill, and look down upon the mighty seething mass. It is a sight to make one weep with bitter tears-with tears almost of blood. Under the smoke canopy yonder, what doings! A soul is losing its last hold on virtue and holiness, as you look; as you look, an infant, with boundless capacities for virtue and holiness, is being born. Strong men are pining, rascals are thriving: all seems a maze and a whirl. Patience, patience! there is a meaning in it. If we cannot trace the meaning, whose fault is that? Our own. Close to the sea, so close that if any little puff of wind arise, some little spray will scatter round you as you sit; close to the sea there is one rock I do especially love. I need not name the county, which of course is my own. I need not name the precise spot: its title indeed is terribly prosaic. But the rock is broad, and flat, and firm, and has a front of its own to face the sea with: it is not a particularly beautiful rock, and has no legends attached to it; but it stands there, in a plain broad way, facing the sea. And on that rock, looking out over miles and miles of water-at noon, bright and glowing as only our western seas can be, specked and sparkling with a thousand accidents of light; looking out over the sea as the gulls come home, and their barking cry begins to cease on the air: as the waves roll in lazily, lazily, as though their day's work is also done, and as the red sail of the trawler disappears behind the point, the fisherman's toil being over: on that rock how the hours pass by! The workmen have long left the quarry: all labour on sea and land is over and done: there is a deep silence, broken only by the weary plash, plashing of the indolent sea at our feet. Oh, solemn and sacred "edge of the dark!" And "the edge of the dark," as we gaze out on the seething city or on the slumbering sea, shall figure itself as twofold: the edge of the darkness approaching, the edge of the darkness receding. And the nights are short in summer. Even now the moon is up, and it is nearly as light as day. Yet a few hours-yet a few hours-and the morning will be here! MY UNCLE'S There is nothing extraordinary in the facts which I am about to relate. They are simply suggestive and suggestive only to those who have thought more seriously on the subject of dreams than is the general habit. Most people will find in the following story a very common kind of dream, and a coincidence little marvellous. It would be altogether out of place to enter here upon a review of the various theories of dreams which have been propounded from age to age. All such theories, numerous and different from each other as they are, may be classed under one of two heads: there are the supernatural theories and the natural theories. The simple old belief that "the dream is from Ꭰ Ꭱ Ꭼ Ꭺ Ꮇ. God"-that all dreams, true or false, are messengers from the same divine power, with the subsequent variations of this belief, which attributed dreams to the influence of gods or demons, or any kind of spirit, good or bad, is fundamentally opposed to that belief which finds the origin of dreams in nature alone. Aristotle states the thesis broadly, "that dreams are not from God, but from Nature." The observation of dreams, when they are considered as natural operations, becomes a purely psychological study. One school of philosophers will attri bute them wholly to imperfect remembrance of waking sensational impressions. Another school will find in them the most curious evidences and examples of the working of the soul, when partially relieved from the disturbing influences | ineradicable. The dream was always the same : of the senses. The range of this latter school it never gained greater definiteness; its very will extend in such observations from the con- vagueness made it more dreadful. The essence fines of the supernatural down to the plainest of it was passive suffering and continual fear. facts of physiology. Mesmerism, spiritualism A veil hung over the past, shutting out the -all such empiricisms which tremble without doing of the deed. The fury of the murderer, the boundary of science, will give to and take the gratification of hate, the momentary exultafrom dreams their clearest illustrations. The tion and triumph, the lust of blood-these wild distinct existence of the soul apart from the delights, which prompt men to bloodshed, were body, and at the same time the indissolubility absent; only the long remorse and hopeless of their union, the influence of each on each, the endurance remained, and these without even degree to which they may separate themselves, the stinging joy of a remembrance of revenge. the different affinities of the two-all speculations on such subjects will find a common and debatable ground in the land of dreams. a I am no oneirocritic. My business here is to relate, not to interpret. Cicero tells a story of dream-interpreter, whom a man consulted on a dream of an egg. "There is money buried under your bed," quoth the interpreter; "I will dig and find it." There the money was-a golden talent, in the midst of a pot full of silver. The interpreter kept the gold and handed over the silver. "But where is the yolk of my egg?" quoth the dreamer. Whatever golden meaning I find in the present dream-story I shall keep to myself: some mysteries are only for the initiated. I shall confine myself to the simplest relation of facts. In the first place, then, with regard to the dream itself. It was simply an impression upon the mind of the dreamer of a crime committed, of irremediable remorse, of a terrible secret to be kept. It assumed distinctness in two points. The crime was the specific crime of murder; the secret connected itself with one definite spot. My uncle's dream was that he had committed a murder upon some person unknown, and that the corpse was buried under a particular stone of the pavement of his surgery. Such a dream, occurring once, would be nothing strange. Most people have dreamed of committing homicide, and of the remorse attending on that crime; or, it may be, with the inversion common in dreams, have felt a sense of the ludicrous in the commission of the deadly act. But my uncle's dream was of continual recurrence. It returned at stated periods, these periods being strictly regulated by the changing phases of the moon, and, in a less degree, by the changing seasons. Of lunar influences I have nothing to say here; we admit them in some few notorious instances, but deny them in all minor gradations with a most unphilosophical scepticism. Just before and after the full moons of the late autumn and early winter months this dream of my uncle's was invariably more vivid and intense. The recurrence of the same dream is not uncommon; in fact, according to the theory of the sensationalists, a dream, once dreamed, would be more likely to occur than another dream. I grant this, without stating opposing theories. This, then, was my uncle's dream: for many years it was a portion of his life. Its evil influence hung over him like a curse. It was like some terrible inherited disease of the blood, Dreams are without the bounds of time and space. In a night, or an hour, or a moment men may go through the experiences of a life. All the dull, weary woes of day by day may drag on their interminable length for a seeming century, in the space between the two tickings of a clock. Thus it was in my uncle's dream. The veil dropped over the past, the new life of remorse and fear wore on its weary length. The common every-day life mixed itself up in sleep with the horrors of the dream. Day after day seemed to pass, and my uncle to perform his pro fessional duties, waking to them in the morning with the weight upon his mind, and going to bed at night to restless dreams. Day after day the constant fear of discovery haunted him. He read suspicion in people's faces; they spoke to him in ambiguous hints. There, in the surgery, be neath the stone, lay the murdered body, and he was always watching that stone, and knowing that people observed curiously the fixed direction of his eyes. So years seemed to pass away. Every day brought its fresh details-every day added to the intolerable burden of remorse, of fear, of suspicion. Thus in one visitation of this dream he would go through a life of agony. The dream was in its outline always the same, but the details would be infinitely varied. As I said before, the doing of the deed was never included in the dream, only the remorse for a deed done. Who the murdered person was, murdered for what cause, at what time, in what manner these were considerations which never arose. The past was a blank, only the effects of the crime committed remained. The dream was logical within its own bounds. The premises accepted, everything evolved itself in the ordinary manner of waking life. My uncle did not lose or change his personalityhe did not become another man in new scenes; he was still the doctor of Lutworth, and the Lutworth of his dream was the veritable Lutworth, and the people were the veritable people. The real events of the passing time would reappear in the dream; people newly-arrived would introduce themselves into it; those who died would disappear from it. His waking-life was reflected there as in a mirror; only the colour of it was changed. The Dr. Hawtry of the dream was precisely what the waking Dr. Hawtry would have been with a secret crime weighing on his conscience. He was the same man under new circumstances. In accordance with these new circumstances his mood would change. At one time he would feel that sense of irony-that perception of in- | exsuded moisture, while the rest of the pavemen congruity, half-ludicrous, half-triumphant, at the contrast between the murderer that he was, and the blameless man that he was thought to be. Sometimes he would triumph in the cleverness with which he kept the secret; sometimes fear of discovery would predominate; now remorse, unmitigated by any other feeling-the helpless desire that the thing done could be un-of weather this statue bursts forth into a profuse done, would take complete possession of him, A period of self-justification would succeed. At another time he would be weighed down by the knowledge that the terrible burden of the secret was too great for him to bear-that his mind was slowly giving way beneath the strain. The above details I have gathered at random from my uncle's own notes. I have space here only for such vague, broken hints. The outward signs which accompanied this dream were opposite to those which might be expected. The sleep was peculiarly heavy and tranquil, the pulse beat slowly and feebly, the action of the lungs was so slight as to be scarcely perceptible. Socrates, in the "Apology," speaks of death as a deep dreamless sleep; and goes on to describe the pleasantness of ordinary sleep, when so deep as to be unaccompanied by dreams. He is wrong, but the mistake is common to this day. In fact, the deeper the sleep, the more active is the power that produces dreams. The more perfect dreams of this deeper sleep, it is true, are recalled during waking with greater difficulty; and hence, no doubt, the notion of a dreamless sleep. In my uncle's case, however, the remembrance of the dream was vivid and clear on waking, although his sleep was so trance-like as to render it almost impossible to arouse him from it. Memory grasped and retained the images impressed upon the inner senses; the experiences of the inner consciousness were transferred to the custody of the outer. The power which my uncle had of thus retaining a vivid remembrance of his dream I should partly attribute to his habit of mind. The doctor, who is accustomed to be suddenly called up from his bed to attend cases of imminent danger, learns to put off sleep instantaneously, and to resume his waking faculties at once in their full strength. With him there is no twilight state between sleeping and waking, during which the images of the night pass away while the exterior senses are too torpid to grasp them. Again, a doctor's constant practice of observing minute and fleeting symptomatic details fits him especially to mark and seize upon the faintest and most rapid phenomena, which would escape those not so trained. remained dry. Damp and rainy weather was always preceded and accompanied by this exsudation, so that it became to us in the house a kind of barometer. There is nothing unusual in a block of stone thus giving forth moisture. I call to mind an instance in Roubiliac's statue of Sir Isaac Newton. Under certain conditions sweat, while the other statues and stone-work of the chapel remain unaffected. The cause is in the stone itself, or in processes to which it has previously been subjected. Most people will be inclined to find in the peculiarity of the stone of my story a reason for its connection with my uncle's dream. If I offer no explanation of this point, I shall at least account, in the sequel, for the peculiarity of the stone. My uncle's name was Hawtry, and he carried on the business of a doctor in the little town of Lutworth, as I have before intimated. Hawtry is an old and an honourable name. I dwell upon this fact because it is necessary to the right understanding of my story, not because I am any way given to the pride of ancestry. I often hear country apothecaries sneered at. I think myself, that if they do their duty, they are the men worthy of respect above all others in a small country community. The man who feels that he has in his charge the balance of life and death, undergoes a training which must give to his mind a strength and a tenderness beyond the capability of minds not so trained. For centuries the Hawtrys have been connected with Lutworth and its neighbourhood. An estate which had been theirs from the Conquest abuts upon Lutworth, on the northern side. The old mansion house, once famed for its double avenue of limes, is about half-a-mile distant from the town. Very many acres of land, extending to the down-country of the hills, and stretching, on the east of Lutworth, to the sea-coast, formerly belonged to this mansion, so long the seat of the Hawtrys. It was in the time of my uncle's father that the house with its lands had passed out of the family. He, George Hawtry, had come into possession of the estate when it was eaten up by mortgages, when every stick of timber, even to the lime avenue, had been cut down. He had, wisely doubtless, sold the old place and, ceasing to be a squire, had, later in life, applied himself to the study of medicine and had become a doctor. He had bought the business at Lutworth from a retiring practitioner; and thus it came to pass that my uncle had succeeded his father in the practice. For One other observation I have to make here, before I pass on to the simple narration of my story. The stone which was connected with the dream-which, as I have said above, formed My uncle's name, also, was George. part of the pavement of my uncle's surgery-three generations at least the head of the Hawtrys had peculiarities which distinguished it from its had borne that name. Of the grandfather, neighbour stones. It was of a harder grain, a George Hawtry, I have, too, something to say. rougher surface, and a darker colour; evidently It was he who had consummated the ruin of the dug from a different quarry. But its chief estate, leaving it to his son as an encumbrance peculiarity lay in this-that from time to time it rather than a source of income. This grand father was noted for having lived a more than | popular rage was aroused. Lutworth husbands ordinarily reckless life at a time when reckless had hitherto borne their cuckoldom with exemliving was the rule. Those were the days of plary patience, and Lutworth Virginiuses had failed gaming; and he enjoyed a bad eminence of reputa- to excite any popular commotion against this tion among the members of White's. I have heard Appius; but now a sudden revulsion took place. many stories of his extravagant and absurd bets, A demand for vengeance arose. This thirst for but these have nothing to do with the narration in vengeance, and this only, prompted the course hand. If he had confined his wild living to the which was taken. Hawtry was arrested on the town, and had kept his country-seat free from charge of having murdered Alyce Upnell. No such pollutions-as others not much better than one out of the bounds of that whirlwind of rage, he have sometimes the grace to do-I need not suspected him of this crime for a moment. have mentioned his name here. But he had no There was not a shadow of evidence against such grace in him. Lutworth was to him only him. It was proved, at the trial, that he was a preserve of less fatiguing pleasures when he elsewhere on the night of the girl's death. He had become jaded by the coarser excitements of was acquitted, as it was clear from the first he London. Don Juan finds a very tender charm must be. No reasonable person doubted that in the rural Zerlinas; the paysannes Charlotte Alyce's death had been her own act; though it and Mathurine serve to while away the time plea- was for long after, the fashion in Lutworth to santly enough when Juan has fled from the speak of the Squire as of a murderer unhung. exigencies of a Donna Elvira, from the rage of savage brothers and jealous husbands, from his debts and to his doctors. This story I have heard related many times by an old man who numbered the events of it among his personal recollections. I shall have to speak of this man again, so I will put down his name here, and what few particulars concerning him it seems expedient to record. He was generally called Old Matty-Matty being a shortening of his christian name, which appositely was Methusaleh. His surname was Hedger, a common name in the South. He was (I speak of my young days) by some years the oldest in In Lutworth this first of the three George Hawtrys had a local reputation as bad as, if not worse than, that which followed him by rumour from town. The Lutworth matrons and the Lutworth virgins feared and admired him. He was an all-conquering man. However, I am not going to rake up the past scandals of those times. One story of this kind I must nevertheless tell, as it is connected with my present sub-habitant of Lutworth. His trade had been that ject. Of all those pleasant sins which George Hawtry committed, there was one of which the remembrance yet lives in the Lutworth regions. At the time, it raised him into notoriety throughout England, but a wide knowledge of the circumstances has long since died out. The nine days' wonder is soon forgotten everywhere save within the narrow radius of its own special locality. The story is briefly as follows: A girl named Alyce Upnell or Upenall (the name is variously spelt) was one winter-morning, towards the close of the year, found drowned in a pool called Waring Water, which lay south of Lutworth, midway between that town and the village of Waring. The Upnells were respectable tradesmen carrying on the business of saddlers in Lutworth. They were noted for, and proud of, their good fame. All branches of the family bore the same excellent character, so that the very name of Upnell had come to be looked on as a synonyme for virtue. The Alyce found drowned was the eldest child of the chief representative of the Upnell family, who, as I have said, was a saddler in Lutworth. Whether or no any suspicion had been entertained previously with regard to the Squire and this girl, I cannot tell; but immediately on the finding of the body, a whole host of trivial circumstances, unnoticed or little noticed at the time of their occurrence, were remembered and collected together into a body of evidence conclusive against George Hawtry as to the crime of seduction. There was no doubt that he had misled this poor young girl; he himself acknowledged it. A storm of of a stone-mason, but in his old age he lived on a pension, whence derived I do not remember. From this man I many times heard the story of Alyce Upnell. He still clung to a half belief in the truth of that old charge against her seducer. His description of the finding of the girl's body always impressed me. He, then a boy, returning with a cart from Waring to Lutworth, had arrived at Waring Water just when the corpse had been discovered. In his cart it had been conveyed to Lutworth. His special mention of the ice-crystals glittering in the dead girl's hair was the basis from which I formed an imaginative picture of the scene. While the trial of George Hawtry was yet pending, his victim was buried in Waring church-yard. Why Waring, and not Lutworth, to which place she belonged, I do not accurately know. It might be that some demur was made on the suspicion of her suicide; or it might be that the Upnells preferred to separate this reproach upon their name from the rest of their stainless kindred. In Waring churchyard she was buried; and at her funeral there was a great popular demonstration, as old Matty could remember. At the time of that event, the village of Waring lay south of Lutworth, between the town and the sea. The village was upon the coast, and its church rose close upon the beach. For centuries the sea had been encroaching upon this portion of the southern shore. In early Christian times a cathedral with its bishop's palace and wide domains had stood far out to sea, south of Waring. At the time of Alyce Upnell's burial the village was looked upon as already in Ꮓ danger. One of the circumstantial details of old Of the final overthrow and destruction of Waring church, old Hedger could also tell the story. Year by year the sea encroached until the church at high tide was three-parts encompassed by the water. The thick wall that surrounded it, patched and repatched and continually buttressed and strengthened, served for long as a rampart against the waves, defending not only the building itself, but the land in its rear, so that at length the church stood out into the sea on a little peninsula of its own, in advance of the line of shore. It had continued so long in this state that I suppose all alarm about it had ceased. Sunday-services were I believe still held there, for I remember the old man's description of the noise of the wind and waves which sometimes rendered the parson's voice inaudible. Suddenly, one stormy autumn night during a spring tide the sea broke through the wall which had hitherto withstood its assaults. The breach was probably made at one side or towards the rear, not in front, and thus by a force from within a great corner of the churchyard was swept down and carried away. The roof of the church, which had long betrayed the weakness of its rafters in the ribbed surface of the tiling, fell in under the shock. An outbuilding of wood which had served the purpose of a vestry was broken to pieces, and its fragments strewed about the shore. In the morning the people found their church in ruins. After this, the walls gradually disappeared-parts were removed for building purposes, parts succeeding storms toppled over in huge masses. I can remember some blocks of rough concrete towards lowwater mark which people said were the foundations of Waring church. its registers. These have disappeared, whether in the destruction of the church or whether by the subsequent carelessness of the clergyman, I cannot tell. The clergyman who held the living at the time of that storm has of course long been dead; and those few people who take an interest in the births, deaths, and marriages entered in the lost documents, have certainly no chance of having that interest gratified. To return to my uncle. In his humble apothecary condition few remnants of his ancestral grandeur remained with him. His father in the interval between his selling of the estate and his reappearance in Lutworth as a doctor, had travelled much; and in such wanderings family relics, however precious, become scattered and lost. One notable sign, however, of the past and gone ancestral dignity my uncle still possessed; and this was a portrait of his grandfather (George Hawtry, of evil memory, the same who had been accused of the murder of Alyce Upnell) in his uniform as colonel of the county militia. A handsome oil-picture, valuable as a work of art though the painter had not left his name upon the canvas; and bearing, in its likeness to my uncle, unmistakeable proof of being a good portrait. This picture of Colonel Hawtry had been left in charge of a friend during his son's wanderings, and had been reclaimed on his return. It had its place over the mantelpiece in the dining-room, and looked down from that height with a somewhat fastidious air at the homely furniture of the small room. Its likeness to my uncle was striking, Grandfather and grandson were both large, portly, handsome men, having in their countenances that air of greatness which inspires respect and obedience. Both had the same bright frank eyes which met other eyes boldly and with an honest trust. Whatever the vices of the Colonel, they had left small trace upon his handsome face. Looking at the portrait one did not wonder that women and men had believed in and been cajoled by him-the wonder was that such a man could cajole. His vices had been of the amiable order, virtues in excess not in defect, mere movements of too rich-blooded impulse. A heart too easily stirred, an overabounding liberality, a childlike trust in others and in himself. If the inevitable consequences of such vices are not amiable, if lasciviousness and prodigality lead to long trains of cruelty and deceit, crimes abhorrent to the nature of the amiable sinner, he has always a salve for his conscience in the feeling that circumstances are to blame and not he. The face retains its unruffled aspect wonderfully under the consciousness of innocent intentions. However, the portrait must have been painted from the Colonel when a young man, probably before he had a very burdensome load of those retributive consequences upon his conscience. It was said that after that awful incident of Alyce Upnell he Once or was never quite the same man he was before. The white child-face with the ice-crystals in the long tangled hair haunted him. Though he The sea is still rapidly encroaching for miles along that southern coast. Lutworth is now not far distant from the beach. Waring Water, in which Alyce Upnell's body was found, is now a salt pool filled by the sea at each rise of the tide. Year after year the rough winter waves eat great gaps into the land. Fields gradually disappear, roads become impassable, the shingle creeps on and buries all signs of cultivation beneath it. That there was ever such a building as Waring church will soon be only a tradition. twice the fading local remembrance of it has been momentarily refreshed by inquiries about |