I passed a restless and unhappy night. Miserable dreams distressed me. I dreamed that I was sentenced to death for perjury--that the gallows was erected--and that Buster and Tomkins were my executioners. The latter was cruelly polite and attentive in his demeanour. He put the rope round my neck with an air of cutting civility, and apologized for the whole proceeding. I experienced vividly the moment of being turned off. I suffered the horrors of strangulation. The noose slipped, and I was dangling in the air in excruciating agony, half-dead and half-alive. Buster rushed to the foot of the scaffold, and with Christian charity fastened himself to my legs, and hung there till I had breathed my last. Whilst he was thus suspended, he sang one of his favourite hymns with his own rich and effective nasal vigour. Then I dreamed I was murdering Bunyan Smith in his sleep. Mr Clayton was pushing me forward, and urging a dagger into my hand. Just as I had killed him, I was knocked down by Thompson, and Clayton ran off laughing. Then I woke up, thank Heaven, more frightened than hurt, with every limb in my body sore and aching. Then, instead of going to sleep again, which I could not do, I lay awake, and reflected on what had taken place, and I thought all I had heard against Mr Clayton, and all I had seen in the chapel, was a dream, like the execution and the murder. One thing seemed just as real and as likely as the other. Then I became uneasy in my bed, got up, and walked about the room, and wondered what in the world I should do, if Mr Clayton deprived me of my situation, and I was thrown out of bread again. Then I recollected his many hints concerning fidelity and friendship, and what he had said about my being in no danger, so long as I was faithful, and the rest of it; and then I wished I had thrown myself over Blackfriars' Bridge as I had intended, and so put an end to all the trials that beset my path. But this wish was scarcely felt before it was regretted and checked at once. Mr Clayton had taught me wisdom, which his own bad conduct could not sully or affect. It was not because under the garb of religion he concealed the tainted soul of the hypocrite, that religion was not still an angel of light, of purity, and loveliness. Her consolations were not less sweet--her promises not less sure. It would have been an unsound logic that should have argued, from the sinfulness of the minister, the falseness of that faith whose simple profession, and nothing more, alas! had been enough to hide foulest deformity. No! the vital spark that Mr Clayton had kindled, burned still steadily and clear. I could still see by its holy light the path of rectitude and duty, and thank God the while, that in the hour of temptation he gave me strength to resist evil, and the faculty of distinguishing aright between _the unshaken testimony_ and _the unfaithful witness_. I did not, upon reflection, regret that I had not recklessly destroyed myself; but I prayed on my knees for direction and help in the season of difficulty and disappointment through which I was now passing.