awful circuits—­still slowly, still noiselessly.  The eternal, unbroken silence was another element of horror.  The doomed spectatress of this solemn, maddening whirl would fain have shrieked, or even whispered, to break the silence, but she could not.  Either her powers of articulation had disappeared in that region of universal dumbness, or the dead atmosphere was waveless, and could vibrate to no sound.  She knew, by harrowing experience, the scene that was to come, and she prayed inwardly to God to strengthen her for it.

The two black objects swelled and swelled in even proportions, until they became as large as a full moon just seen above the horizon; then to the size of two full moons, and a dozen, and a hundred, and a thousand.  Still black, still noiseless, still revolving slowly, like a tardy but certain doom.  Then a quarter of the leaden space was filled with their gigantic bodies, and the lurid air was darker.  Then a half of the heavens was blotted out; She grew faint and sick, as she moved her head to the right and left, and up and down, and watched the dizzy revolutions of those vast orbs, between which she knew that she was to be crushed at last, as by the nether and upper millstones.  Her inarticulate cries to God were unheard.  It seemed as if there were no God for that accursed part of the universe.

Majestically, slowly, silently ever, the orbs increased.  Two strips of the sky could be seen constantly changing positions, but always opposite to each other.  These were the gaps, fast narrowing, which were to be filled up by the swelling worlds before her destruction was accomplished.  Her long familiarity with the movements of this stupendous enginery of death enabled her to calculate to a nicety when the crash would come.  She lay like the bound victim under the guillotine, watching fer the axe to descend.

The blackness of darkness above and beneath and around her ... a suffocating compression of the stagnant air ... a thrilling consciousness of the close approach of the two cruel orbs.... a superlative stillness ... and then a mighty attrition, in which the mortal part of the poor girl was about to be ground to atoms, when she ... awoke.

She threw back the heavy blankets that oppressed her chest, as if they were the crushing danger.  She looked overhead, expecting to see a whirling globe within a foot of her face.  But she saw only the ceiling, made visible by the pallid light of the room.  Then she knew that she was in her own little room, and that this frightful adventure was only the old, old dream, that came to her two or three times a year, as far back as she could remember—­the same always, without addition or curtailment.

CHAPTER IV.

A VISION OF HORRORS.