dogs, and cats too, in immediate proximity, might make matters worse. Honoré d'Urfé was literally "stunk out of bed" by his wife Diane's too numerous, too highly-favoured, and too highly-flavoured canine pets; and a separation came of it. As to cats, let grave John Evelyn furnish us with an illustration from his diary, what time he lay at the White Lion at Orleans, after a narrow escape from slaughterous highwaymen: "In the night a cat kitten'd on my bed, and left on it a young one having six ears, eight leggs, two bodys from the navil downwards, and two tayles. I found it dead, but warm, in the morning when I awaked." Miserable or not, Evelyn had then and there a strange bedfellow. The corpse of a new-born kitten, however, notwithstanding its abnormal organization, might to many tastes be less objectionable than a human corpse. Experiences of the latter sort are recorded by General Sam Dale, the Mississippi Partisan; and in Lord Anson's Voyage, of one of his sailors who lay for several nights in the same hammock with his brother's corpse, in order to conceal his death, and so to receive the dead man's allowance of provisions. To Bishop Hooper, peaking and pining for eighteen months * A night with a vile corpus of the lower orders of our fellow-lodgers, paulo post mortem, is matter of frequent record in books of travel and adventure. Captain Drayson, for instance, tells of a hunter who fainted beside the leopard he had killed, and which had all but killed him first : all night he lay there in helpless pain, disquieted once or twice by a slight pressure against his shoulder, although he well knew his spotted foe to be out-and-out dead. In the morning he found that a puff-adder had crept close to him for the sake of the warmth. More than one strange bedfellow here. Wild Sports in the South gives us a queer story of a parson and a panther that got shut up together in a pig-pen on a dark winter night. "I've made the badger's hole my bed," is one of the miseryextorted avowals of that misérable of Crabbe's making, Sir Eustace Grey. Lord Holland's Spanish reminiscences comprised one of a man with a basket of vipers at an inn, who proclaimed their freshness and liveliness to the travellers who had to share his bedroom: at night one of these was awakened by feeling something cold passing over his face; and at the same moment the viper-vendor was heard to cry aloud in the dark, "My vipers have got loose; but lie still, gentlemen; let nobody stir; if only you do not move, you'll not be hurt." and more in the Fleet Prison, the stillness of a dead companion would perhaps within moderate limits-have been preferable to the "wicked man and wicked woman" with whom, after a time, his lot was cast, in a cell with a bed of straw and a rotten counterpane, the prison sink on one side and Fleet ditch on the other. The reduced "gentility" that, before now, has had to put up with the night associates of a low lodging-house-say in a room so crammed with sleepers that (as one expert phrases it) their breaths in the dead of night, and in the unventilated chamber, rise "in one foul, choking steam of stench,"-may well lie awake, with a good deal to think of, none of it any too wholesome. Other good things besides good mannerssuch as good temper, or good nature, for instance-must be corrupted by evil communications such as these. When the travelled author of Under the Sun complained of the insect pests in his bedroom at El Globo, Havana, he was told that he might consider himself very lucky not to find in it such additional trifles as a cow† in one corner and a wheeled carriage in another. This he was slow to believe, and he adds that it was only later, after some wayside experiences in Andalusia, and having shared a room with a pedlar's donkey, and being awakened in the morning by the "hard, dry see-saw of his horrible bray," that he realized to a full extent the "strangeness of the bedfellows with which misery and a tee-totum existence make us acquainted." * : Happier the outsider, even though out in the cold, after the manner of "Little Dorrit's Party,"--when a Burial volume formed that young heroine's pillow, and a snoring imbecile was her sole companion through the night the shame, desertion, wretchedness, and exposure, of the great capital; the wet, the cold, the slow hours, and the swift clouds of the dismal night: this, we read, in the fourteenth chapter of her history, was the party from which Little Dorrit went home, jaded, in the first gray mist of a rainy morning. + Gerard Eliassoen at the German inn complains of Christian men being forced to lie among cattle; and the old chamberman (not maid) replies, "Well, it is hard upon the poor beasts. They have scarce room to turn." But the cow bed-mate that during the night eats up Gerard's pillow (of hay), is far less objectionable than the drunken biped of another Endless are the samples that might be offered of the liabilities (unlimited) and discomforts of bedfellowship in time of war. Such as the case of Spechbacher housed with cows for months together, and "covered up with cow-dung and fodder," when George Zoppel hid the wounded patriot from the Bavarian dragoons. Or again Sir Robert Wilson with the Russian army at Heilsberg, passing the night with old General Platow, who rested his venerable weight on the cramped as well as cabin'd, crib'd, confined Briton, while torrents of rain. were falling, and both officers got slushed in the mire. Wet through, and with the dead weight of a drowsy and damp old Russian atop of him, Sir Robert was in a poor way that night. One of the best-remembered passages in the experiences of Smollett's Count Fathom is where that hero takes shelter in a robber's hut, and is put by a withered beldame into a sleeping-room where he lights on the dead body, still warm of a man who had lately been stabbed and put away under straw; and at least one modern critic admires the "intensity and power as of a tragic poet" with which are described Count Ferdinand's sensations during the night, and the sensational device by which he saves his life,-lifting up the dead body, and putting it in his own place in the bed, while he makes off through the forest, under the guidance of the aforesaid hag. Fiction also offers us the experiences of Christopher Staines on a raft, "alone, alone, all, all alone, night's experience-at an inn where the bedrooms were upstairs dungeons with not a scrap of furniture except the bed, and a male servant settled inexorably who should sleep with whom: neither money nor prayers would get a man a bed to himself there: "You might as well have asked to monopolize a see-saw." But this again might almost be counted luxury in comparison with the lot of the convict in one of Dickens' short stories, who is chained to a Piedmontese burglar and manslayer, the touch of whose hand is horror to his companion: "How I sickened, if his breath came over me as we lay side by side at night. . . . When I needed rest, he would insist on walking: when my limbs were cramped, he would lie down obstinately, and refuse to stir. He delighted to sing blasphemous songs, and relate hideous stories," etc. The penalty of being a Siamese twin was but a degree or two worse than this, while it lasted. alone on a wide wide sea," except for a corpse to bear him company of his little namesake Tadpole, so 'uncommon afeard of the body" upstairs, as his padrone explains: "I don't think he ever see one before; and he had to sleep next it one night, when we was full; "-and again, of Cripps, in Dred, who, like coarse animal men generally, had a stupid and senseless horror of death," and therefore, on finding how near it was to him, "recoiled from the lifeless form, and sprang from the bed with an expression of horror." Edgar Huntley sleeps unawares on a dead Indian: "My head had reposed on the breast of him whom I had shot in this part of his body. . . . I started from this detestable pillow, and regained my feet." It is of the North American Indians that Chateaubriand is writing when he tells us how one tribe had a law for exposing the body of a slain man on a sort of hurdle (claie) in the air, while the slayer, fastened to a stake, was compelled "à passer plusieurs jours à ce pilori de la mort." The jours include the nuits; but the nights must have been the worst. The climax of the "strange agony" of the wounded soldier, worked up by Coleridge in his picture of a battlefield, is when all foredone with toils and wounds, death-like he dozes among heaps of dead: "The strife is o'er, the daylight fled, And the night-wind clamours hoarse. Lies pillow'd on a brother's corse!" When the Roman general, Lucius, in Cymbeline, comes upon Fidele's form thus pillowed, he at once concludes that recumbent form to be dead, not sleeping แ "For nature doth abhor to make his bed With the defunct, or sleep upon the dead." § III. THE COLOUR TEST OF GUILT. King Richard III., Act ii., Sc. 1; Othello, Act v., Sc. 1. WITH Gloster, in presence of royal Edward and his queen, of Hastings, Rivers, Dorset, and Grey, "marked you not "How that the guilty kindred of the queen Look'd pale, when they did hear of Clarence' death?” Presumed guilty, because turning pale,-the presumption is much in request. The colour test of guilt, judging by change of colour, my be a very shallow device, but is in some quarters, and to serve some purposes, an approved and accepted one, -enforced in season and out of season, with reason, and without it, or against it. At that same royal gathering, when the death of Clarence was discussed, "Look I so pale, Lord Dorset, as the rest?" had Buckingham asked; and the answer was, "Ay, my good lord; and no man in the presence But his red colour hath forsook his cheeks." It is for Gloster to draw or suggest his own damning conclusions. In an earlier historical play of the series, fear, not guilt, is presumed in a parallel instance; and this presumption too is scouted by those it concerns: "No, Plantagenet," is Somerset's protest, "'tis not for fear, but anger," etc. Elsewhere, again, it is another Gloster who, when suddenly arrested, tells Suffolk, "Thou shalt not see me blush, Nor change my countenance, for this arrest; A heart unspotted is not easily daunted." It is of Hubert, the presumed murderer of young Arthur, that Salisbury says, "O, he is bold, and blushes not at death." Iago is for pressing home the colour test of guilt against Cassio's mistress: "Look you pale, mistress? Do you perceive the ghastness of her eye? . . Claudio is bitterly ironical at the expense of his repudiated bride, the much-wronged Hero: |