BOB INGERSOLL'S DREAM.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 195, 22 December 1876, Page 15

808 INGERSOLL'S DREAM.

-H One night, after speaking in his usual fashion to an audience of many hundred persons, Bob Ingersoll went to his chamber, and laid him on his bed to rest. He had a dream. The man dreamed that he stood in space, face to face with a great clock, that slowly beat out the seconds of a miserable existence. The face of the clock was as ghastly as the face of death. Ihe hands crawled over the face like the worms of corruption, and crawled slowly on toward the midnight hour. Every tick of the clock was the splash of a great drop of blood in a pool of "ore. -Every plash of blood sprinkled in his bosom with hideous red. He tried vainly to wipe away the stain j and he found that his hands, too, were red like his bosom, and like the pool of blood at the foot oi the clock. But the hands of the clock crept on to midnight. There shot in around him a hot suffocating fog of night. Then the hopes and loves and hates and aspirations within him groaned and gasped and died. The hot, suffocating shroud of vapor wrapped m . m °. re closel y» and he, too, groaned and gasped; but death came not to nun as it had come to his hopes and affections. He stood there alone;in the dying universe, alone with the great clock tht splashed blood at the beat of every miserable second, while the hands crawled on to midnight. To this m*n every breath was agony, every heart throb a century or pain. He felt his bones crumbling in decay, and his flesh rotting while it clung to him. His tongue was swollen in his mouth. His throat was dry and horribly bitter. He cared no longer for the stains of red blood, but bathed his brow and his eyes in the pool, and moistened his lips with the clotted gore. In the same breath he blasphemed and prayed for the light of the morning. Ihe hands of the clock reached midnight and stopped. There were no growing hours thereafter, no dawn, no morning li°-ht, no sun. Even the blood splashing, and the pool died away so that ho could no loDger moisten his lips or quench the indescribable thirst tnat consumed mm. In anguish that>as terror, and .in terror that was agony, he broke the awful silence, and cried : ' " Is there no sunlight ?" A voice louder and harsher, hoarser, and as' sneering as his own, answered out of the silence : "There is no sunlight for the stirrer up of strife." After an eternity, again he cried : " Is there no dawn ?" And the voice replied with a bitter sneer s •'There is no dawn for the denier, the liar, and the'blasphe"When an eternity of eternities had passed, he cried out once more : "My God ! Is there no morning ?" And the voice came back : " There is no morning, and you have no God \"