IT was about noon, on the seventh day from that in which these things happened, that Adam Blair opened his eyes after being buried for fifteen hours in a deep sleep, and gazing about the chamber in which he was lying, began to make his first faint endeavour towards consciousness. He was so feeble that he could not lift his head from the pillow without being oppressed with a dizziness, under which he was immediately compelled to submit, and it was not until after many efforts, that he so far recovered himself as to be sensible that he was lying alone in a half-darkened room, and that many days must have passed over his head since any distinct image of any kind had been retained by his memory.

A dim, confused, languid, dream of interminable duration, seemed to have been hanging over his faculties, and even now he could scarcely satisfy himself that its oppression had passed away. During that long dreary night what sufferings had he not undergone? Whither had his spirit wandered? Whence had it returned? Pain had been with him; burning pain had racked every thew and sinew of his frame. Chill icy pangs had been with him also: even yet his limbs were stiffened with the sense of cold, creeping anguish. But over all alike what a cloud of blackness, utter impenetrable blackness, had been wrapped and folded! Troubled visions had passed before him, glaring through the enveloping darkness—strange unearthly sights, mixed up with human faces he knew not of whom—strange hollow whispers, hands grasping him, and blindness, and helplessness, and dumbness, and deadness, suspended all the while like weights upon his bosom. His feeble brain reeled under the exertion his faculties were making to retrace something of what had been during this blank interval, and he closed his eyes because the lids felt so heavy that it was a pain for him to keep them open. Body and mind had been alike shaken, alike unstrung, by the fever through which he had passed; and he lay in a state of total languor, as if expecting some new assault of a mighty foe whom he had no longer either the power or the hope, or even the desire of resisting.