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He, however, died in the arms of his afflicted wife, and was surrounded by his family, a privilege purchased at the expense of severe pain, but still one to the husband and father even though he had been snatched from his pangless death-sleep to possess it, poor fellow!

"I was never more joyed to see thee; for of a truth thou dost come in a good hour. A little while and I had seen thee no more, for my eyes grow heavy with the death-sleep." "Nay, say not so. Art lost, then? Why, so am I. I came out to seek three horses that are strayed, and was overtaken by the snow. May they dwell in Odin's stables, for they have led me to thee. Art thou cold, Gudruda?"

When this chum arrived he was unable to speak, but just pressed his hand and smiled, and went off into his death-sleep. A boy, who could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen, was lying on the side of the hill with his head on a flat stone. He had been hit by a piece of shell, and both his legs were broken and mangled above the knee.

Would they not look to us for the satisfaction the chief rogue denied to them? We, as they, were left helpless in that woful place. Before us, as before them, lay the peril of hunger and of thirst, the death-sleep or the greater mercy. And who should ask them to accept it without a last supreme attempt, a final assault, which should mend all or end all?

Sheldon wondered what officious hand had removed them. Yonder stood the pretty little bedstead, shrouded by closely drawn white curtains. Philip Sheldon walked slowly across the room, and drew aside one of the curtains. He had looked upon the death-sleep of Charlotte Halliday's father, why not upon hers? She was not there!

I felt myself gradually sinking into the death-sleep after I had taken it; with the thought of Belle uppermost in my mind, I allowed myself to sink "no more catastrophes after this last and grandest one no more red faces big mouth tea-napkins wonder if she will be sorry!" and I became unconscious.

Of this, indeed, I am sure, for that knowledge was part of the secret wisdom of my people." "But you were not dead. You only slept." "The sleep was a death-sleep which went by like a flash, yes, in an instant, or so it seemed. Only the shell of the body remained preserved by mortal arts, and when the returning spirit and the light of life were poured into it again, it awoke.

They were followed by musicians, who beat their drums, and rattled shell instruments at irregular times, as they advanced. They came to the grave, lifted the body on its blanket from the bier of evergreens and flowers, and slowly lowered it. The old chief stood stoical and silent, his eye fixed on the star in the darkening shadows. The face of Benjamin was noble and beautiful in its death-sleep.

And while these two were absent I at times wandered about the city with Joyful Star and Francis Hartness, who, it was plain to see, already looked with eyes of love and longing on her beauty, as in good truth I myself could have done had I dared, and could I have forgotten that older love of mine who still lay cold in her death-sleep in the cave by the lake yonder, over the mountains to the westward, whither I had already cast so many longing glances.

I took his watch and whatever else he had in that way, carried him on deck and dropped him over the side, using as little ceremony as he had employed in the disposal of his shipmates, but affected by very different emotions; for there was not only the idea that the vital spark was still in him; I could not but handle with awe the most mysterious corpse the eye had ever viewed, one who had lived through a stupor or death-sleep, for eight-and-forty years, in whom in a few hours Time had compressed the wizardry he stretches in others over half a century; who in a night had shrunk from the aspect of his prime into the lean, puckered, bleared-eyed, deaf, and tottering expression of a hundred years.