your waistcoat-pocket full of Cockle's
antibillious pills. 'And it's no use telling me now,'
says I to my husband this very morning, 'poor
dear Mr. Ellis works harder,he do, than any
dray-horse, he don't get his good night's sleep
regular all along of this blamed billiard-table
and the racketing of those good-for-nothing
gamblers in Mr. Medlicot's back rooms,' says
I, 'which I'd take my davy, in any court of
justice, I will.'"

Notes and requests though the laundress for
earlier hours and quiet, the audacious Medlicot
laughed to scorn. He sent his compliments to
Mr. Ellis, and hoped that if the billiards and
social meetings annoyed him, he (Mr. Ellis)
would revenge himself by firing off Armstrong
guns, practising the ophicleide, or playing a
barrel-organ. The rooms were his (Medlicot's)
own; he wanted no intrusion and no
interference. He paid his rent probably as
regularly as Mr. Ellis did, and would continue to
do so. What could Ellis do? He was too poor
to be able to sacrifice half a year's rent, already
paid.

Every night now, some fresh form of nightmare
weighed upon the student's sleep. If he
lay with his hand out of bed, dead men
clutched it, or skeletons kissed his cheek. He
underwent all the horrors of twenty sudden
deaths. Already the change in his health became
the subject of conversation at the clinical
lectures, and in the dissecting-room. He was
recommended various kinds of tonics, every
friend presented him with some favourite pill.
Fast men, who did not and could not read,
comforted themselves with the painful fact that
Ellis, who was going in for honours, was killing
himself by inches. The grave quiet men
regarded him in a cold and stealthy way as doomed
to be "nowhere" in the coming intellectual
race; old house-surgeons drew him aside in
the wards and hoped he was not reading too
hard, or giving up exercise altogether.

"To die just on the point of being a great
man," said a famous visiting surgeon to him one
day, "is no gain, Mr. Ellis. Honour sets you
on, yes; but suppose honour push you off
when you are on; what then?"

Ellis, in fact, became a text to warn men
from excessive study, both for the hard-workers
and the do-nothings; but they little knew of
his struggles and wrestles with the nightmare
that haunted him.

It was the eighth night of this torture that
Ellis, going to bed earlier than usual, after a
healthy walk from the furthest end of
Kensington where he had been to a dinner-party,
suffered the culmination of his strange sufferings.
It had been a pleasant party with some excellent
music after it, and he had returned home
apprehensive, but still in good spirits.

The billiards were going on below him;
the game was quieter than usual (perhaps for
larger stakes), and Ellis fell asleep with reasonable
rapidity, for he was weak with previous
nights of suffering. His dreams glided by with
the feverish rapidity of those that visit a
diseased brain. He was himself passing along
a moonlit street, and suddenly arriving at his
father's house, at which he knocked with the
glee of a happy boy returning from school.
But a sudden chill striking him, he looked up
and saw that the knocker was stapled down,
that the area railings were scaly with red rust,
that the lower windows were opaque with dirt
and foggy scum, that the upper windows
were piled up and darkened with old boxes
and packing-cases, that the uppermost of all
were without glass, and birds flew in and out.
On looking closer, he saw that the outer door
was crusted with mud, and there were ink-stained
fly-blown cards in the ground-floor
window, announcing "Offices to let." The
door-bell was broken, and a single ray of
moonlight touching one of the walls, showed a
broken glass-door leading to a deserted and
bare inner room, where something shapeless
and black lay across the floor, just within the
shadow. But, as he stood there at the door,
it opened and let him in; and, passing up-stairs,
he came into a carpetless room, where a
lady in tears sat with her back to him, playing
a wild dirge upon a piano; and, when he
approached, she rose and took him by the
hand, and said, in tones so cold and faint,
"Dearest, I was thinking of you!" that he
knew it was she whom he had loved when a boy.
But when he drew her to the moonbeam to see
the face he so prized, she vanished, and before
he could search for her in other corners of that
house where he knew she must have hidden
in pure wantonness of her great happiness
at their second union, the dream changed and
grew more vague and ominous.

He saw great processions of maidens in
white, and bearing torches, pass up and down
broad flights of marble steps, with wailings and
moanings, as if they were wrung from them by
some great and unutterable misery, as of souls
in purgatory; and all around them and above
them the sky was crimson with burning temples
and ringing with the jar of clashing weapons.
Then he seemed hurried away to undergo
transmigrations of tortures—to be strained on
the rack, to be flattened in presses, to be turned
on spiked wheels, to be pierced with arrows, to
be hurled from mines, to be thrown to lions or
chased by bloodhounds, to be bound hand and
foot and cast to sharks.

He had just been trodden down by wild
elephants, when a hand shook him awake. He
started up with groans and half articulate cries.
There was a weight of lead in his brain and upon
his chest.

"Who—who is it?"

"It is I, Hewson," said a pleasant voice,
"come to take you down to Blackheath till
Monday. See what fresh air will do! Come
along, old boy, jump up and dress; we'll have a
cup of coffee, and then catch the eleven ten train
at  Charing-cross.  Why, you look awfully seedy.
Come, put yourself together, old man. Do you
know it is past ten already? Why, you are like
Mr. Coventry Patmore's lover: