quickly become filled with crowds of fire-flies. First I thought: "They will settle on me and melt me." But a much worse fear soon took possession of me. I thought: "Ah! I am lying in gun-cotton: I know that it is gun-cotton. They will ignite it, and I shall be blown up!" And no sooner had the idea entered my brain than, with a flame and a roar, that which I had feared came to pass, and I disappeared in a cloud of ill-smelling smoke.
The reader may reasonably imagine that these experiences must at the time have been very dreadful. But such was not the case. If I had any terrors, they speedily gave way to a kind of resignation that, I imagine, very nearly resembled the Oriental abandonment to Kismet. Even when I was thus blown up and scattered to the four winds of heaven, the sense of the inconvenience of my position was instantaneously extinguished by the reflection that no man can for ever avoid dissolution. And, moreover, I was immediately compensated for that fleeting period of discomfort. I existed, it is true, no
